How Ralph Lauren won the workwear wars as America returned to the office
People are hanging up the casual aesthetic of the pandemic years to dress up again
The US is finally dressing up again — and just in time to revive a handful of old-school American brands.
Ralph Lauren and Tapestry have been the winners of a return-to-office trend as America’s formal dress upswing lands at the right moment in their turnaround efforts.
Last week, Ralph Lauren reported a 13 per cent increase in revenue in its most recent quarter on strong sales growth for its “inclusive luxury” products. Handbag maker Coach, which comprises the large majority of Tapestry’s business, reported 15 per cent sales growth on Thursday.
A major driver of the brands’ recent success was the accelerating return to in-office work, said Laurent Vasilescu, a retail analyst at BNP Paribas. “One more day back in the office is 20 per cent where your wardrobe has to move, where you can’t wear sweatpants,” he said.
US companies from Amazon to JPMorgan announced return-to-office mandates in 2025, pushing up the average number of days required in offices nationwide by 9 per cent from August 2024 to August 2025, according to Flex Index.
Ralph Lauren and Coach beat out preppy rivals to capitalise on the workwear boom: J Crew has struggled to mount a coherent strategy under private equity management, and the brand’s comparable sales fell 8 per cent last year. Shares in Gap have fallen 18 per cent this year, due in part to a slump in dress sales at Old Navy.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, sales growth at Ralph Lauren and Coach had been stagnant for years. Ralph Lauren launched a strategic plan in 2018, pulling back sharply on discounting. By 2022, the brand had cut its off-price sales and exited hundreds of poorly performing department stores. Tapestry also began reducing discounted inventory in 2020.
Both brands also roughly doubled their marketing spending during the turnaround period: Ralph Lauren from about 4 per cent of revenue in 2018 to nearly 8 per cent this year, and Tapestry to 10 per cent of net sales from 2020 to 2025.
The efforts took a while to pay off. Sales grew sluggishly at both brands between 2020 and 2023 as Americans stuck to casual work-from-home dressing. Sales of athletic wear and athleisure — a pandemic dressing staple — grew more than 40 per cent from 2020 to 2023, according to market researcher Euromonitor.
“Dress-up categories, suitings or dress shirts or social dresses, have definitely taken a hit,” Macy’s then-chief executive Jeffrey Gennette told investors in 2020. “Those categories are going to be compressed for a while.”
Five years later, Macy’s had a new message from the front lines of retail: “We’re in a dress-up cycle,” chief executive Tony Spring told investors in December, citing strong sales in tailored clothing, dress shoes and handbags.
In the first half of 2025, sold-out listings for loafers grew 26 per cent at big US and UK retailers, while sneaker sell-outs declined 8 per cent, according to market research business Edited. Survey data from GlobalData shows that 59 per cent of Americans report dressing “smart”, up from 49 per cent in 2022.
Meanwhile, growth of the activewear market slowed dramatically to 7 per cent between 2023 and 2025, according to Euromonitor.
The bets made by Ralph Lauren and Coach are paying off, as dressier trends push Americans to “investment pieces” that are still within reach to an audience that cannot afford designer brands. The two brands have found the “sweet spot”: more affordable than designer, better quality than fast fashion, said Jessica Ramirez, a retail consultant. Both brands have said they are growing most quickly with Gen-Z.
In addition to the return to the office, Americans are also dressing better by choice, influenced by high inflation and a difficult job market, Ramirez said.
“As times get tougher with jobs and the economy, people tend to dress up more,” she told the FT. “There’s a lot of people who want to defend their job, so the way you show up to work or the way you show up to an event becomes even more important.” The trend had seeped into Americans’ non-working hours, Ramirez added, where they are wearing less athleisure.
Angel Valladares, 38, has been a fan of Coach for more than a decade and is excited to see his peers increasingly wearing the brand. These days, “guys are trying to have fashion sense”, he said on Wednesday.
Valladares likes Coach, and guesses his peers suddenly do too, “because it’s affordable, relatively speaking, but still quality”.
On a September call with investors, David Lauren, an executive at Ralph Lauren and the founder’s son, described the brand as offering a vision of “inclusive luxury” across its stores, restaurants and cafés.
“People dress up to be part of this world,” he said.
In fact, Ralph Lauren was lucky that it was pitching its turnaround at a time when consumers wanted to dress up at all, said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail.
The brand’s “efforts that go back years have culminated at a point in time when people are looking for their styles”, as have Coach’s, said Saunders.
“It’s a very happy coincidence in a way.”