NEW YORK – With a clear white graphic look and spacious pockets, the uniforms that will be worn by Team USA at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympic Games were unveiled on Wednesday by the official costume designer Ralph Lauren.
The uniforms, along with clothing designed by Ralph Lauren for the Olympic Village for American athletes, had been ready to go when the Games were postponed last summer due to the pandemic.
“Looks like we’re all gone now,” David Lauren, the company’s director of branding and innovation, told The Associated Press before the revelation. “They were designed, produced and ready to run.”
The games are now scheduled to open on July 23 and end on August 8, as organizers continue to figure out how to keep them with the pandemic still raging and just 100 days from the end. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren is ready to open and close the parade equipment for the more than 600 athletes of the US team, those who participate in the Paralympics and Olympic-themed items for sale to the public.
The uniforms of the opening ceremony will be unveiled in July.
Lauren, the son of the founder of the fashion giant, said that sustainability was the most important thing in this Olympic tour.
Ralph Lauren, who has equipped the US team since 2008, has worked with Dow on a process for dyeing cotton pretreatment that uses less water, chemicals and energy than more traditional methods. The process was used for a navy polo shirt that each athlete will receive.
A leather alternative that uses herbal materials and agricultural by-products without synthetic plastics was used for a patch on stretch white denim pants at the closing ceremony, which are made of cotton grown in the US. And, like the lightweight drawstring jacket, a red, white and blue striped belt to be worn by athletes is partly derived from recycled plastic bottles.
The patches are already a reminder of the historic Olympic delay: It is called “Team USA”, with the year 2020 printed in red.
White zipper jackets include navy blue collars and hoods and red, white and blue striped cuffs. An American flag patch is on one arm and the “USA” is on the other, the latter descending on one leg of the pants. Athletes will wear a classic white Polo shirt, white sneakers with striped design and navy blue masks also made of American cotton.
The company’s Olympic retail collection will be available for purchase starting Wednesday on RalphLauren.com and in June at certain Ralph Lauren retail stores, certain US department stores and online at TeamUSAShop.com. All revenues support the US team.
“We want our athletes to be truly ambassadors of American style, culture and sportsmanship,” Lauren said recently through Zoom in Manhattan. “I also understood that the message for the Olympics was about sustainability, that this would be the most sustainable Olympics in history and a chance for the team to demonstrate ingenuity around new ways of thinking about our environment.”
Daryl Homer, a silver medalist in sword fencing at the 2016 Games, hopes to make his third Olympic appearance. He was one of three competitors in Tokyo who modeled the AP closing uniforms at the Polo Ralph Lauren store in Manhattan’s SoHo district.
The Olympic delay, said Homer, 30, was sometimes harsh, with a year of competition.
“I feel pretty ready,” he said. “I’m just getting ready as best I can, given the situation. I’m just happy that there will be Games.”
Homer, who lived in Harlem during the pandemic, used his downtime to be “a normal person and went a little outside of sports. I read, I took walks, I ran, I tried to stay in good shape. be present where I was. “
Jordol Barratt, a native of Honolulu who now lives in San Diego, was also on hand to show off the uniforms. The skateboarder, who hopes to make the Olympic team for the first time now that her sport has been added, said: “Everything is starting to feel real in the last month or so. It feels much more real and much more stressful.”
The 22-year-old has a national team, a pro tour stop and a world championship to go before the Olympics, without competition from November 2019.
“Great things have been done for women’s skateboarding. It’s a very male-dominated sport,” said Barratt, a park skateboarder, about his dog’s Olympic sign.
And Barratt is delighted with the chance to head to Tokyo with her childhood friend, fellow skateboarder, Olympic competitor and 2019 world champion Heimana Reynolds, originally from Honolulu, who moved to San Diego in November 2019, before the shot pandemic.
“We were probably 8 or 9 years old, we only saw her at the skatepark and we constantly skated together,” said Reynolds, also 22 years old and a skateboarder in the park. “We never really thought we would be so far in skateboarding. It’s really cool that I went from childhood skate friends to traveling around the world and competing in it now.
“It was probably the first skateboarder I’d ever seen,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, it’s really cool that there are girls skating.’
Reynolds, Barratt joked, was the “good-looking baby” growing up.
Lauren mentioned that the Olympic Games will be the first time since the pandemic started when “the world came back together”. He called the Games an “exit party” with “the feeling of hope we all need in our lives right now.”
Like other Olympic fans, Lauren is disappointed that she no longer participates in the Tokyo Games. The organizers have decided that spectators from abroad will not be allowed. He participated in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, London and Atlanta.
“It’s one of the great experiences of my life, to see all these teams coming together, to see the energy. It’s like you’ve never seen it before,” he said. “When you’re there in person, it’s electric.
“There is a feeling,” he said, “that we are all one.”