The One Where Ralph Lauren Collaborates With Friends
For all the soft-focus narratives and laugh-track predictability of Friends, one plotline stands out for its strange attachment to realism: the career trajectory of Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel Green. She started with a job at a coffee shop, then scored an assistant gig at a fictional, shady garment district fast fashion company called Fortunata Fashions through Joey, whose dad is doing plumbing work there. After that, her resume wrote itself with an almost uncanny vérité. She got a job as a personal shopper at Bloomingdale’s, and a few seasons later, moved over to Ralph Lauren as a merchandising manager. She was fired towards the end of the series because her boss caught her interviewing for a job at Gucci, a detail that seems oddly lifelike in a show that suggested an unemployed chef could live in a sprawling two-bedroom apartment in the West Village with a terrace and a view into George Stephanopoulos’s apartment. Soon after, Rachel was offered a job at Louis Vuitton that would have required her to move to Paris. (She didn’t take it, and won back her role at Ralph to stay with Ross, making her the original Girl Who Didn’t Go To Paris.)
The insistence on Rachel’s Actual Job at Ralph Lauren (she even got promoted, which came with her own office), was one of the show’s best motifs. What made it even better was Ralph Lauren’s ability to play along, with Lauren himself even making a cameo in an episode when Rachel somehow accidentally convinced her boss she’d made out with the designer in the copy room.
Rachel’s faux-fashion career comes full circle today with a collaboration between Ralph Lauren and Friends in partnership with Bloomingdale’s. For the show’s 25th anniversary, the retailer has recreated Central Perk, the show’s iconic coffee shop, as well as Rachel’s office. (The sets will travel to other Bloomingdale’s locations throughout the summer; I guess everyone has totally forgotten about that Gucci interview thing.) The collaboration is not a release of new products but a curation of already extant pieces that Rachel might wear—wool and pinstripe suiting, velvet blazers, black leather pants (which I’d like to imagine are there to throw shade at beleaguered leather pant-wearer Ross, although the collection does not include menswear.)
The Ralph collection isn’t the only Friends merchandise marking the anniversary. In July, Pottery Barn announced a line of products including mugs and pillows with pillows and inside jokes, as well as an infamous apothecary table that Rachel falsely told Phoebe, the show’s hippie anti-capitalist, was from a flea market. (Warner Bros. Consumer Products partnered with both brands for the deals.) And if you’re dead-set on finding Friends-adjacent menswear, consider replicating Joey’s million-shirts look—Balenciaga will be there for you.
Originally Appeared on GQ
