During the 1990's in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Lo Life crew was running the show when it came to wearing Polo by Ralph Lauren. The Lo Lives were a famous boosting-shoplifting crew that emerged out of Brooklyn - Marcus Garvey Village and St. Johns & Utica Avenue in Crown Heights Brooklyn. These two crews from Brookly formed together from MGV & SJP and called themselves Lo Lifes. Formerly, MGV heads were known as United Shoplifters Association, while the St. Johns & Utica heads used to call themselves Ralphie's Kids.
In these times and as previously mentioned, you couldn't be caught walking by yourself in any part of Brooklyn, whether it be Park Slope, Brownsville, Vandeveer projects off of Foster and New York avenue, Red Hook, Bushwick, Bedford Stuyvesant or anywhere else, if you didn't know people from other Brooklyn chapters of the Lo Lives crew. Today, the Lo Life crew still exist, but things are not the same. They still cherish wearing Polo, Tommy Hilfiger, Guess, Girbaud and the other name brand clothing.When most people in Brooklyn matured from the phase of wearing name brand clothing, they came to the realization that wearing fashionable garments is just a state of mind. Back then, you couldn't tell that to someone from Flatbush, because we were stuck in our fashionable ways. As life goes on, we matured, made the transition, and continued growing in spirit and mind.
While name brand clothing is nice to wear, it's not everything to life. Boosting Ralph Lauren or any other fashionable brand name clothing is wrong. In those times, inner city youth lived carefree and often times, took the train to Manhattan in large numbers to go on what's called "boosting sprees." In those times, you could randomly see inncer city youth hanging on the back of New York City buses such as the B35 or B44 bus on Nostrand Avenue, or the B41 bus on Flatbush Avenue just for kicks and giggles. Little did they know that hanging on the back of a New York City bus opened them to enormous danger of potentially falling to oncoming traffic and getting themselves possibly killed if they were hit by a car or truck after falling off the back of the bus for fun. Not everyone from Brooklyn was that adventurous.
Ralph Lauren.com recently re-released the vintage 1993 CP-RL collection. Ralph has already brought back the old 1987 and 1989 Polo sail collection that quickly sold out in a matter of minutes. Prior, Lauren re-released the nostalgic "Ralph Lauren Snow Beach" collection, as "Snow Beach Polo pullover jackets" quickly sold out on the Ralph Lauren website in less than 5 minutes. OpeningCeremony.com experienced temporary server outages when they released Polo Snow Beach the same day at 12:00 p.m., where the jacket caused the website to experience a massive spike in traffic and go offline, resulting in it being sold out in a matter of minutes and only 1 jacket sold per customer.
RL plans on re-releasing more vintage Polo clothing from the memorable 1990's in the next 20 something days from the date of this post. The re-released collection will include items hard to get your hands on since Brooklyn days including Polo equestrian scarves, shirts, silk tops, and more. Share this thread on LinkedIn.com, Twitter.com, Pinterest.com, Facebook.com, and YouTube.com.