Elegance has marked the early sportswear but mass marketing rounded the edges of polo shirts somewhat. Comfort and casual wear brought the polo shirt into the men’s clothes market in the late 1960’s. The "penguin" shirt for middle class men had become a retail staple by the mid-1970’s. Yet consumers noticed shrinkage when hot water and heated drying was used. So polyester was introduced into the thread fibers for maintenance and extended wear.

When Bronx-born New Yorker Ralph Lifschitz was looking for a way to break into the retail consumer market, he followed the menswear trends to ramp off part of his existing tailoring business into a mass marketed line he could contract out for manufacturing but license under his name for specialty store sales in better stores across the United States. One day his (new) name would become a household word.

When Ralph Lauren was men’s costume designer on the film The Great Gatsby, the scene where Daisy revels in the plenitude of Gatsby’s many shirts paved the way for an explosion of shirtmaking. Casual trends in entertainment, dining, and family living meant that more informal clothing was needed. Lauren saw that men spent more money on one sport shirt to wear every day of the week than on a tuxedo they hung in a closet most of the year.

Polo shirts in every color became the rage. People who understandably neither golfed nor played polo nor picked up a tennis racket wore the shirt. The status symbol of wearing a $75 shirt was the typical feint of 1980’s conspicuous consumerism. The Polo shirt could be worn with a dress watch and one carat earrings or simply to play tennis in. Soon every designer or clothing manufacturer had a polo shirt with breast embroidered logo to sell.

The 1980’s fashion statement was undeniably the Polo shirt, a cotton knit or cotton pique knit polo shirt restyled for everyday wear. Ralph Lauren priced his shirts in the $70-80 range, and they became a status symbol to wear around the clock, anywhere. Manufacturers made polo shirts in every rice range and status logo shirts were counterfeited around the world, since international sales were so likely.

Over the years the Polo Ralph Lauren empire branched into bedding, perfumes, and beyond. Ralph Lauren (as he renamed himself) has become a media icon for putative consumer preferences and WASP grooming habits. By defining the polo shirt market as his brand, Ralph Lauren owns a significant percentage of the fashion legacy of the polo shirt. Recently Ralph Lauren has relaunched his Polo brand as the "Purple Label" it one of many transmutations while still retaining the Polo mystique and sportswear clothier domain.

Thanks in large part to the business and fashion savvy of Ralph Lauren, the polo shirt became an all day shirt to be worn at breakfast, lunch, dinner, shopping, dining, while traveling and to parties. Occasionally a polo shirt will be featured in the photo shoot of one of his many updated lines of clothing, accentuating the successful heritage of Ralph Lauren designer fashion.

The Polo shirt craze made the polo shirt something that could be worn to dinner, during sports, put on a child or senior citizen, or traveled in. the heritage of the Polo knit shirt is alive today, and polo shirts worn casually all hark back to this era. Ralph Lauren, an arguably definitive polo shirt maker, has become the official clothier of the tennis players at Wimbledon.