It was an unwritten rite of passage for young men from my socio-cultural group, a Wasp’s bar mitzvah: My first suit. I’d grown up in blazers and tweed sport coats. I stopped wearing a clip-on and learned to tie my own necktie when I was five, in the exciting days leading up to the start of the equivalent of first grade at St. George’s English School of Rome. It was as significant as learning to tie my own shoelaces. Except for two years at St. Stephen’s in Rome, which had no dress code (sadly; it was the 70s), I wore a tie every school day until I graduated Trinity. But a full suit was the first step into manhood. I would also need black tie for coming out balls and whatnot, but that would have to wait until next year; for now, Dad and I couldn’t agree on the suit. But we rarely agreed on anything at all.

I was sixteen. We’d recently moved back to my native New York City from Rome; after spending my formative years there, I was now an Ameropean, or “Eurotrash” as the New York gossip columns would so kindly refer to us in a few years. I wanted a vestito blu in the midnight blue that my older Italian friends in the City wore. But Dad insisted on gray, preferably the gray of the Knickerbocker Greys, a traditional after-school military group that I’d thankfully missed out on while we were in Rome; knowing how to waltz and foxtrot was never going to help me at Studio 54. At first Dad said he would only pay for Brooks Brothers; he was fiercely loyal to them for having dressed him on account after he got his MBA and was starting his career on Madison Avenue; true-blue Yankee families don’t support their children in that way after they turn eighteen, and my father’s parents were no different. But the boxy, steadfastly fashion-indifferent cut of Brooks Brothers’ clothes offended my Italianate sensibilities. They also represented Dad’s ultra-American taste in clothes, which had been a constant embarrassment to me in Rome, with its unrelenting, zen-like national obsession with style and millennia-old great taste. So we reached a compromise and walked up the block to “that upstart, Paul Stuart.”

Things went from tense to almost outright war as I stood on the fitting platform, only slightly less horrified at the cut of this suit; Paul Stuart was known for natural shoulders with almost no padding. This was 1980: there was no such thing as almost no shoulder padding; there were mountains of shoulder padding. Dad was utterly oblivious to that; his idea of the way a man should dress has never varied, not for eighty-five years. Paul Stuart’s clothes suited a broad-shouldered American prep-school jock. I was a tall string bean. To make things worse, there was a pair of strange men dressed all in black leaning against the wall observing my disintegrating self-esteem and rising hatred for Dad. One was very old, from my perspective, with dank white skin like an overcooked dumpling, trendy glasses and a mop of platinum-white hair. His younger companion was taller and quite handsome — he could certainly fill out this floppy mess of suit.

“Jesus Christ,” Dad hissed. “It’s Andy Warhol.”

I knew of Andy Warhol but I didn’t know what he looked like. I’d first heard the name when my mother tottered home after a reception at the American ambassador’s residence in Rome — we lived around the corner, so she literally tottered home in high heels — seething about how the new ambassador’s wife, Danielle Gardner, had decorated the place. Mom was a decorator, a watercolorist and an avid art historian who spent almost every minute of her years in Italy on a pilgrimage to its endless trove of art treasures. When I was twelve, she took me out of school to see a fresco of the Twelve Apostles by Caravaggio in the dining hall of a Carmelite convent with her American women’s art history group, led by Mom’s guru, the esteemed professoressa Dompei, who looked and sounded like Mother Ogra from The Dark Crystal. “You’ll never be able to see this once you’re a man; they’re not allowed in the convent. Few people have seen it, anyway; the nuns are cloistered and silent. It’s only because professoressa Dompei is held is such high regard, etc…. You’re a very lucky boy.” Sure enough, I shall never forget the fresco that so few members of my sex have seen in real life.

I would come to know Villa Taverna, the ambassador’s residence, inside and out. The new ambassador’s son, Tony, was my age and went to the same school. We quickly became friends, more for expediency than anything else; I was his closest American teen neighbor. He was a bit of a drag because he hated Rome, missed his friends in New York so much, talked and sobbed about them relentlessly; eventually he was packed off to Exeter or Andover for the rest of his father’s term. He was also a native New Yorker, but a proper one, not an Ameropean with a Britishy Mid-Atlantic accent like me, who could easily walk up Via Veneto blindfolded but didn’t know Park Avenue from Broadway.

My New York was confined to the Harvard Club and its immediate environs, which is where we stayed when we were visiting the States or en route to visit the grandparents in Australia. I also didn’t understand much about American politics, certainly not like Tony did, but I still argued with him, taking the side of my Republican parents, who loathed Jimmy Carter, Tony’s Dad’s boss’ boss. Every morning I would cycle around from my house, throw some cheeky banter at the Italian security guards that let me through the gate, prop my bike on the wall of the villa at the end of the long driveway, and hop in Tony’s black bulletproof Lincoln. “Dad’s tax dollars are paying for this,” I reminded Tony constantly; to hear me talk, Dad single-handedly subsidized the entire American mission to Rome, but that’s how much Dad hated diplomats. (We were never allowed to trick or treat on Halloween with embassy personnel kids; Dad didn’t want us mingling with them, and Mum back him up rather than start a fight. Seeing as Italians don’t celebrate Halloween, I basically stopped trick or treating at five when we moved to Rome.)

If that seems like a scene out of Call Me By Your Name, you’re not wrong. If I were pitching a series about my youth it would be “Mad Men meets Call Me By Your Name.” We lived in crumbling villas, went to school in crumbling villas, vacationed in crumbling villas, and flitted between languages without awareness of which was what.

The offending Warhol painting (“Just ruins the place! That gorgeous villa! Such a shame!”) was a portrait of ambasciatrice Danielle herself, who like every New York Democratic socialite was a friend of Andy’s. (“Can you believe she allows herself to be called ‘l’ambasciatrice’? She’s signora Gardner, like everyone else, la moglie del ambasciatore, thank you very much. And she had an affair with the Italian consul in New York, so they shipped him off to Africa, or something far away from Rome, they were so embarrassed. So, congratulations! Our ambassador is a cornuto, for whom all Italians have such respect, as we know.”)  Like many traditional oil portraits, it hung over the fireplace in the living room. To my classically trained eyes, which had been dragged up and down the boot of Italy, hitting every museum, palazzo, villa, monastery, art gallery along the way, it seemed okay, nothing to hate, nothing to love. But because my mother loathed it so much, Andy Warhol became for me a symbol of Democratic excess and cultural boorishness.

It wasn’t until years later, after he was killed on TWA flight 800 when it crashed during takeoff from JFK, that I realized that the handsome man standing next to Andy, reflected in triplicate in the tailor’s three-way mirror, appraising me like I was a life model in an art class, was Jed Johnson. In that moment he didn’t matter: All I knew was the most influential artist of our day was staring at me and my fuddy-duddy, unfashionable father, trying to come to an agreement over a Knickerbocker Grey gray suit with zero shoulder padding (in 1980), as if he might purchase us. And it looked for all the world like I couldn’t shop for myself, which to a hormonal teen with more triggers than quills on a porcupine made me want to jump out the window.

I understand now that Andy, né Warhola, was probably watching me not just because observing people was what he liked to do most, but because I was “the other,” a curiosity, something he wasn’t at my age. He surrounded himself with young people from my world, maybe because nobody’s family stories are quite as fucked up as ours, but more likely because we were so removed from the blue-collar Pittsburgh he was raised in, the modern equivalent of Fitzgerald characters. His Waspy entourage was the closest America has to aristocrats, and they loved him; he made them cool when most of us decidedly aren’t. Perhaps I caught Andy’s interest because I was a juvenile specimen of Vespa new yorkensis caught in his natural habitat in the wild, not one of the dozens of used-up, trust-fund dope heads fawning over him at The Factory. And his God-given American droît du célébrité meant he could just stand there and watch and unnerve the hell out of me and Dad.

Another young genius from a humble background in the Bronx named Ralph Lifschitz must have seen us the same way when he was a salesman at Brooks Brothers in the 60s, the store where Dad had wanted us to celebrate my Wasp bar mitzvah — there would be no danger of Andy Warhol peeping at us there. (“Fucking Paul Stuart.”)

Maybe Ralph helped Dad try on a new gray suit much like his other gray suits, except a size or two larger than usual; Dad was packing on the weight in the 60s, what with a typical ad man’s four-martini lunches, and the Mad Men drama going on at home in Rome. Maybe, on one particularly momentous day for Ralph in terms of his career, Dad oversleeps the wake-up call from the concierge at the Harvard Club, but finally answers the determined knock at his door from housekeeping, who know his temper all too well to let him sleep in. Battling a five-alarm hangover, late for a meeting with Proctor and Gamble, he finds a mysterious grease stain streaked across his favorite tie, the only tie he’d managed to pack while suffering another crippling hangover, worsened by a barrage of verbal fire from my mother. Not allowed to be in the club without a tie, Dad covers it up for a furtive exit, dashes along 45th Street almost at a run, crosses Fifth to Madison, and ducks into Brooks Brothers on the corner of 44th.

That “really helpful, dapper guy, Ralph with the big smile, swell guy” greets him in the tie section. He persuades Dad to be a little racy with his usual club tie choice and try one with a thin gold stripe. Impatient as ever, Dad looks at the Omega his father gave him when he graduated Wesleyan and realizes he was off by an hour. He’s not really late for the meeting; the Omega is so understated he frequently reads the hour incorrectly; tens and elevens, twos and threes are often swapped, especially when he’s “thick-tongued and bleary-eyed.” He hesitates about the gold stripe; he allowed Mum to persuade him to buy two ties that were different from his usual at Battistoni on the via Condotti that he’s never worn. As a favorite colleague frequently jokes, Dad is “so conservative he’s to the right of Genghis Khan,” a comparison that fills him with the pleasing satisfaction of a job expertly executed.

He’s so relieved at not being late for the meeting with his most-important client that he goes with beaming Ralph’s suggestion. He’s expecting a big bonus this year for finally having turned the Italy office around, plus there’s the extra stipend for privately doing his civic duty abroad by spying for his country on insurgent communists in Western Europe. Time pressure gone, he allows dapper Ralph to sell him two more ties. He’s always felt drawn to this guy’s full-lipped, sensual charisma; he’s tiny compared to Dad, but he has his own standout style that is familiar but also original, much like Dad’s art directors and copywriters, who need to separate themselves from account men like Dad but still be presentable in presentations to ultra-conservative P&G. What he admires most about Ralph is his chutzpah in drawing so much attention to himself with his dress style despite being so slight and small.

Ralph asks him about his summer plans. With more excitement than a hangover that severe normally allows, Dad replies that he’s rented the house outside Lucca in Tuscany where John Le Carré wrote The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Dad devours Le Carré; a spy is what he really wants to be, even though this side job comes with some ethical issues that are making him anxious and causing him to drunk more heavily than usual. Ralph’s exclaims that it’s one of his favorite books. So how is Dad doing with his summer wardrobe? It must be hard to keep up with the stylish Italians. Dad’s been in Rome long enough to have gotten over trying to adapt Italian style; when he thinks of it, he pictures Mum talking him into buying a pair of Gucci loafers, but that gold buckle made him feel effete — to the top of his wardrobe shoe rack went those, too, sitting out of eye range, side by side with those ridiculous black velvet black-tie pumps. Way too groovy, and ‘groovy’ isn’t in Dad’s vocabulary. He’s reached the conclusion that Italian clothes don’t suit American men, who tend to be big and blocky. As Dad likes to say about his broad, kilt-bearing hips and ass, “Ya can’t drive a wedge with a tack hammer.” Thin-hipped Italians have tack hammers.

Ralph agrees and makes a mental note: What clothes make the real American man? This goy he’s helping is a perfect specimen: six-foot-two, shaped like a rectangular slab of wood; dresses like a midcentury version of his Puritan ancestors; powerfully built, supremely confident, with a resonant, senatorial voice. If only he could make clothes for this man, he would turn him into his dream version of a tweedy English sportsman for an Esquire fashion spread that would shake up the men’s apparel world.

Dad agrees his summer wardrobe is looking worn and shabby, and Italians are immaculately dressed at all times, even the poorest of the poor. He follows Ralph up to the casual-wear floor, where Dad picks out two pairs of loose Bermuda shorts, one in blue, the other in a blood-orange red, which Dad isn’t too sure about, but Ralph persuades him that colors like these look great with dark-blue blazers and loafers with no socks. “These colors are what guys are wearing now in the Hamptons.” Dad resists replying that the Hamptons are not exactly a recommendation for old New York families who traditionally travel up the Hudson for the summers; Dad spent his summers as a kid in Alexandria Bay in the Thousand Islands bordering Canada. Shortly after they were married, he and Mum purchased a country house closer to the City in a similar Victorian gated summer colony in the mountains.

He responds to the Hamptons comment with a diplomatic “is that so?” and, reminded of his socially progressive mother, begins to ask dapper Ralph the swell tie guy questions about himself. Ralph bashfully replies that he’s from the Bronx, a first-generation American who went to Talmudic school, then Baruch College. Dad, eager to come across as the egalitarian everyman his patrician mother raised him to be, pretends to have heard of both, making a mental note to look up ‘Talmudic’ when he’s next in the Club library; he’s heard it before, but he’s not sure what it is.

Dad comes from a rigid Yankee background, made even more stalwart by his father’s dour and bellicose Ulster Scots ancestry; none of it very cheery, much less urbane. “Wasp” has yet to enter common parlance and won’t ever really settle in among the people it describes, many of whom look on class snobbery as un-American and therefore unacceptable. Still, Ralph feels the pressure of social insecurity, and diverts the subject from his background by mentioning that he might not see Dad after today: He has saved up enough to quit working for Brooks Brothers and start his own line of ties. “That’s swell,” Dad says with utter sincerity; all American men should be “self-made,” even if what they really mean is the family hasn’t given them a dime since they turned eighteen; college tuition doesn’t count because it’s paid to the institution, not to the child, and education maketh man and woman both. Dad is sure Ralph will be a success; he has such great taste and presents himself so well. In immediate response to the comment about his great taste, Ralph slips it in that his wife Ricky thinks so, too; fashion and great taste is for queers, and Ralph doesn’t want this swaggering macho All American to think that he’s a pansy.

Ralph guides dad to the casual shirt section, to the latest selection of polo shirts, his big smile reflecting his pleasure with Dad’s glowing endorsement of his plans. Dad is ambivalent about Brooks Brothers’ polo shirts; it’s one thing to have the company’s Golden Fleece emblem discreetly embossed on the gold buttons of his blue blazer, which he keeps meaning to have changed to Harvard-emblem buttons, quite another to be wearing it over one’s heart, practically eye level with the guest you’re pouring a bloody Mary for. Forget that French Lacoste crocodile thing; he’ll never wear one of those. Why should he be promoting a brand if he has already paid for the shirt? Ralph notes silently that this is a completely different take than anyone he grew up with or socializes with would have. Most of New York, most of America in fact, would wear it in a heartbeat, if they knew that it stood for an elite men’s store they would think twice about shopping in, yet a man like this walks around like he owns it. He assures Dad that it’s very discreet, that nobody will know what Brooks Brothers is in Italy; after all, it’s a country that is all about clothing-brand emblems, from Gucci on down. Dad relents and buys three of the four polo shirts Ralph suggests for him. He forgoes the salmon pink; he doesn’t want to encourage his son, who is clearly turning out to be queer despite all efforts to beat it out of him.

Realizing he is now for-real late, Dad grabs one of the new ties and puts it on using the mirror on the counter. Without waiting for Ralph to fill out the sales slip, Dad prints his name on the top of it next to his four-digit account number, signs it, and tells Ralph to have the remainder of his purchases delivered to the Harvard Club in his name. He shakes Ralph’s hand earnestly, looking him straight in the eye, wishing him the best of luck with his new venture. Again: “It’s going to be a great success, I can feel it.”

Dad has no idea.

As Ralph folds the salmon pink polo, he ponders the Golden Fleece logo stitched above the breast. During his training before starting at Brooks Brothers, it was explained that it alluded to the Greek mythological story about the hero Jason and his quest to steal the Golden Fleece, the most precious wool in the world, which for the company symbolized the highest quality of textiles and clothing manufacturing. Ralph muses that a Harvard man like the customer who just left would get the symbolism right away without even thinking about it, but it would be lost on people from his world, on the young movers and shakers in New York City who were breaking down traditional barriers and making fortunes in finance and real estate, not just in traditionally Jewish trades like apparel and entertainment. A good brand wasn’t subtle, it announced to every stratum of society from the top on down what it was, what it stood for.

Ralph imagines a logo for his own company that spoke plainly to a consumer, that told the whole story at once, a customer that had the money but couldn’t even imagine being born into a world where a gentleman with a numeral after his last name just signs the sales slip and has his purchases delivered to his club down the street. He has passed the Harvard Club on his lunch breaks: it’s a gentleman’s club from a movie; the public rooms girded with dark oak paneling two stories high; the larger-than-life-sized oil portraits of American presidents who attended the University and the trophy heads of big game shot by Teddy Roosevelt encircling men who rule the most powerful nation the world has ever known. The sort of man that emerged from the club might wear the salmon pink shirt Ralph is folding for what it’s really meant for: Playing polo.

People in Ralph’s world would never get subtle references to Greek mythology. They would need to be told, “Wearing this shirt makes you seem like you play polo.” He knew then what the logo of his new company needed to be: A polo player, mallet raised, charging toward the customer: “Buy me and you will play the sport of kings.” It was then that he envisioned the ad campaign, many double-page spreads in Esquire. His models would be old-school Hollywood matinee idols on horseback. It would be… Ralph Lauren Polo Club … no, no, no … Polo by Ralph Lauren.

You know what happens next, and if you don’t, or are desperate for more details about the largest-scale, most-lucrative act of cultural appropriation in history, then HBO just released the documentary, Very Ralph. It deftly rewrites the scenario I’ve just painted by omitting that dapper Ralph the swell tie guy worked for Brooks Brothers at all — but he did. The documentary is essentially produced by Vanity Fair, a major recipient of Ralph Lauren ad dollars; it’s a high-end promo video an hour and a half long. About the origin of his brand, Ralph states in the film, “I always loved sports, so I thought, why not polo?” I’d reply, “Why not tell the truth?” But Ralph has already been through the cultural-appropriation wringer, more so than any designer because, well, the one culture that isn’t represented in his entire oeuvre is his own,  Ashkenazi Jewish. Ralph is portrayed as an avid collector and sampler. He admits he’s not a real designer because he can’t draw or cut a pattern, which makes him “anti-fashion.” He’s a curator more than a designer; an exterior decorator for people rather than dwellings; a fashion sales and marketing wiz obsessed with quality craftsmanship; a straight man with better taste than all of gay America combined. Initially he collected from only one culture: Mine. Then he branched out: on one side across the Atlantic to consume our mother culture, British, the promotion of which earned him a knighthood earlier this year; on the other side to the American West.

Ralph painted a fantasy of my people — very few of us actually play polo; it’s more of a British and international jet-set game — and recast us with midwestern Teutonic and Scandinavian blonds as if he were the Leni Riefenstahl of fashion advertising. Photographer Bruce Weber, who shared Lauren’s taste in chiseled, athletic, white all-Americans — albeit in a more sexualized way — was his image maker; soon, everyone wanted to live in a Ralph Lauren world, even those who apparently already lived there, except nobody bothered to send us the memo about the makeover.

We didn’t recognize ourselves, of course: Northeastern establishment folk are rather dorky, cerebral, and decidedly unglamorous. We’re like the Pierce family on Succession, which is as grand and high-end as we go; no matter how much money we have, true Yankee culture is willfully down-to-earth and un-ostentatious, much more so than our British equivalent, whose increasingly destitute aristocracy we propped up with our America-sized fortunes for a century, until it dawned on us that we were being hustled of our wealth in exchange for titles and castles that we weren’t supposed to want in the first place.

Our early American ambassadors to European courts stood out because they only wore plain black evening dress, no ribbons, uniforms, epaulets or any gilt ceremonial froufrou; their wigs were unpowdered. I believe the presidential residence in the White House is the smallest for a head of state in the Western world — it certainly isn’t the size of Buckingham Palace, the Élysée Palace, or the Quirinal Palace in Rome. The American president doesn’t live in any kind of palace at all — that’s how OG Americans roll.

People from my socio-cultural background don’t often refer to themselves as ‘Wasps’; the more common term would be ‘preppy’. What ‘Wasp’ basically signifies is a Northeastern establishment Yankee who went to the right schools, belongs to the right clubs and lives in the right places. Being white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant is more of a cultural touchstone; you can’t say the Catholic, Celtic Kennedys aren’t Waspy. And I know plenty of Jews who are Waspier than I am, most from my parents’ social circle: the Warburgs, the Loebs, the Bronfmans, the Lehmans. In terms of upbringing, Jared Kushner has far more in common with me than he does Ralph Lauren. If Mike Bloomberg and I stood in front of someone who knew neither of us and we asked, “Which one of us is the Wasp, which the Jew?” they would point to Bloomberg as the Wasp; in fairness, I have deliberately scrubbed my background from my lifestyle and appearance. Once you stop parsing insignificant religious and intra-white ethnic differences, being a Wasp boils down to schools, clubs, and residences, that’s it.

In fact, this article is probably the first time I’ve ever referred to myself directly as a Wasp, and it’s only because an Australo-British childhood friend observed recently, “You and your family are quite Waspy.”

“Really?” I’ve always assumed that because of Italy and our deep connections to India that we were sort of multiculti beastly bourgeois Bohemians.

“Oh, my God, yes.” She was raised on 73rd and Park, went to the right schools and stuff, so I suppose she knows.

When I was talking to my step-brother about the woke War on Whites and cultural appropriation at Mum’s country house a few months ago, he referred to himself as a Wasp. He was also wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, something he agreed we would never have worn a couple of decades ago. If I met a man in the 80s or early 90s wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt, or anything with the Polo logo, it immediately told me he wasn’t really from my world. Ralph Lauren has built his company founded on his interpretation of our culture into a six-billion-dollar-a-year empire, but the last people he persuaded to buy his goods were the people who inspired him.

Forget the fact he ripped us off culturally, which was admittedly galling and a huge part of why we shunned him; his prices were also way too high. Why pay that amount for something you’ve been buying your whole life for a third of the price, even at a high-end store like Brooks Brothers? Joan Rivers once said, “God invented Gentiles because somebody had to pay retail,” but that doesn’t mean we’re not incredibly cheap; it just means we find haggling distasteful, and that wholesale is for merchants.

There are many fantastic jokes in Succession, but the ones I laughed hardest at were those that skewered Yankee parsimoniousness in a few spare words. When Nan Pierce, the matriarch of the family, who are based on the Wall Street Journal Bancrofts, picks up the breakfast menu at the Allen & Co.-like conference for her fellow billionaires, she gasps “Would you look at the prices!” Indeed, Nan packs in a few cheeky winks at our disarmingly weird ways, like when she invites her cook to put down the serving tray and join the two families for a drink, deliberately underscoring how nouveau riche the Roys are; Logan would never do that with one of his serving staff. But the most bang-on insightful comment belongs to Tom’s throwaway line to Shiv about the “low-thread-count sheets” on the beds of the stately Pierce estate, which looks like it’s located in Oyster Bay or Locust Valley, where lockjaw originated. (My stepfather speaks with a heavy lockjaw. He also has a grouse hood ornament on his very brown 1989 Buick, which he keeps up in the country to tool around in locally, a willful touch of tweedy, eccentric frugality.)

We give our cheapness a positive spin as “being sensible.” It comes from the top down: as we know from Fergie’s complaints, Buckingham Palace only uses 40-watt bulbs.

My late, much-beloved Texan stepmother was the first to introduce Ralph Lauren products to the family, in the mid-80s. She was a stunning woman, a former beauty queen, tall, athletic, blond, exactly the ideal Polo brand archetype, a regal presence who might easily have posed on a lawn in front of an Oyster Bay mansion, surrounded by equally Nordic children and grandchildren, for ads shot by Bruce Weber. In other words, she looked nothing like the women I was raised around, the complete opposite of my mother. The first time we met, I immediately zeroed in on the Polo logo embroidered on her shirt. I stiffened and thought, “Oh, no!” The Texan twang didn’t help my first impression, and her name was Donna, not exactly a name in the Preppy Book of Baby Names; to an Italian speaker it translates as ‘woman’.

“Hello, I’m Woman.” I should hope so.

The first time I noticed that I’d used Ralph Lauren’s products myself was washing my father’s sheets after I’d had sex in his bed. They were much softer than anything I’d ever experienced with my low-thread-count, any-sheets-that-are-on-sale family, almost decadent coming from my father. And the antiqued just-so blue and white stripe was pleasing and elegant. I was beginning to see the point.

In 1986 Lauren opened a confidently tasteful flagship store in a converted Gilded Age mansion on 72nd and Madison. Nobody could find fault with it — breathtaking. I was working for a fashion magazine at the time, and suddenly Ralph Lauren became something for fashion editors to consider; hitherto he’d secured editorial by being a top advertiser, which forced Condé Nast publications to feature him regularly.

The New York flagship was a beachhead right into the heart of our neighborhood on the Upper East Side. After a long siege, Lauren breached the walls of our fusty dominion; the mountain came to Mohammed, rather than waiting for us to stop fondling the wicker and make up our minds about Ralph Lauren. It marked the beginning of his acceptance into the world he had harnessed so effectively.

The reluctance to wear anything with the polo insignia is still hard for me to shake: I bought an as-new secondhand Polo hoodie on eBay recently, by far the highest-quality hoodie I’ve ever owned; the first thing I did was also buy an embroidered patch featuring the Royal Scottish Lion insignia to cover the polo-player logo. I never sewed it on, but I do twitch a little when I put on the hoodie.

There are a couple of reasons no Yankee would take offense at Lauren’s exploitation of our culture, and it’s not because white people aren’t allowed to take offense simply by the circumstance of their birth, which is the most outrageous of the many racist constructs of the Woke Inquisition. The lesser, more subliminal reason we aren’t upset is nobody celebrates and promotes a more positive image of America than he. As the founding socio-cultural group of this country, we can only applaud him as a national treasure, just as he treasures us.

The greater reason is something people tend to forget when they are out there frothing at the mouth and screaming about what an unjust, bigoted, heartless nation we are: We are first and foremost a mercantile nation. Our mandate isn’t to impose our system of governance on other countries, it isn’t territorial conquest in the name of expanding our “empire”; we alone had the atomic bomb for three years after World War II — we could have taken all the marbles. Instead we built other countries back up, showering billions upon billions on them with few strings attached, all so we could trade, so that self-made Americans could make themselves ever richer, the richest society mankind has ever known. We do not begrudge Ralph Lifshitz for dropping his Jewish origins, taking a French last name and turning our world and ways into floods of profit for him and his shareholders. So he made a decent buck off us — Bravo! No true American would find fault in that.

And he gave us something in return: He held a mirror up to our dowdy, boorish world — “British culture with all the fun bits taken out,” as I’ve always put it — and reflected a far more sophisticated, beautiful version of ourselves, crafted to the highest standards.

I first heard about cultural appropriation because of Ralph Lauren. In 2014 he created a collection around a Native American theme, using archival photos of 19th-century portraits of tribal leaders in his ads who had themselves appropriated and adapted White dress in clever, stylish ways, which was Lauren’s visual point. The main issue was that Lauren had commercialized items of apparel that were sacred to Native Americans, and was using images of sacred ancestors in his advertising.

As someone from the culture that Lauren has handsomely profited from, and who has no problem with it except for the steep prices and that pesky, on-the-nose polo-player insignia, I followed this news item with some interest. I started a discussion in the comments section of a news site, approaching it not as a white man but as an orthodox atheist. Among the relentless, boundless evils of organized religion, one of the most destructive is this notion of making places, objects and people “sacred.” Suddenly, magically, at the stroke of a whim, an arrangement of eagle feathers and turquoise beads becomes sacrosanct, and the person who is not entitled by birth to wear it is committing a sacrilege, now known formally as cultural appropriation. In my unemotional comment, I explained why ‘sacred’ was not a real, tangible thing but just another human construct, a dangerous game of adult pretend that can lead to extreme acts of institutional violence with hundreds of millions of lives lost over the centuries. There was no such thing as ‘spiritual’, I said — it’s highly unlikely that living things have a spirit, much less inanimate objects. A Native American woman came after me with vitriol and as many logical fallacies as her fingertips could muster on her keyboard. I remember one sentence in particular: “Why, yes, yes, I am more spiritual than you.” Why, yes, yes, you are: how can I be something I don’t believe exists?

Only white people are guilty of cultural appropriation. It seems to apply particularly to rich kids who attend Burning Man. I speak for all Scottish-Americans when I state that I have zero problems with the kilts Burners wear, none in a clan tartan; in theory, you’re not supposed to wear a kilt south of Sterling. But who cares? Wearing them is an homage to how awesome kilts look — a man in a skirt is somehow made more virile — and to the many different ways they can be worn and accessorized. But American Indian feather headdresses, which you can buy all over the Southwest, sold to you by Native Americans, cause outrage and condemnation, not just from Native Americans, but from other woke Whites engaged in unending purity tests through figurative, mea culpa self-immolation.

My favorite cultural-appropriation hypocrisy is white guys with dreadlocks. I think they’re sexy, but when I suggested to a Millennial ex-boyfriend who was growing a gorgeous mane of blond hair that he dread it, his instant reaction was, “That’s cultural appropriation! I could never do that.” Whites with dreads seems to be the only “African-American” thing that we appropriate, unless they also mean that Eminem should stop rapping. It also seems a lot of kids these days have picked up Black slang and phrasing, but that is only a testament to the outsized influence Black culture has on this country, representation that is way out of proportion to their numeric size as a percentage of the population. Blacks have for decades been overrepresented in TV roles, too… but here I am leaping on another fallacious woke construct, diversity casting, when I should be focusing on cultural appropriation.

The thing is, the Rastafarian kind of dreadlocks that Whites are supposedly appropriating aren’t African, and certainly not Jamaican. Traditional African dreads — which as far as I know are were never sported by West Africans, from whom most American Blacks are descended — are much neater, more kempt than the Rastafarian style. The only people I’ve seen with Bob Marley’s style of dreads are the ‘sadhu’ holy men of India, which is where I imagine Rastas also got their style of dreads from.

My theory is supported by another important detail about Rastafarians: Despite the fact that Jamaicans speak English, Rastas don’t use any of the many words we have for marijuana; they call it ‘ganja’, which is derived from the Sanskrit work for hemp; if you want to buy ‘flower’ rather than hash in India, you ask for ganja. Marijuana is considered sacred by Rastafarians — here we go with the S-word, again — and as far as I know only the sadhus of India, who have dedicated their lives in service of Lord Shiva, consider ganja sacred. I’m going to assume that Rastafarians picked up mystical Indian traditions from South Asians who immigrated to the West Indies during the Raj, even though that is mentioned nowhere in Wikipedia.

What about the name ‘Rastafarian’? Does it really come from Haile Selassie’s pre-regnal title, Ras Tafari Makonnen? Honestly, that’s always sounded a bit too esoteric. The more logical etymology for the name of a spiritual path would be that is comes from the Hindi word for path, ‘rasta’, together with the English word for traveler, ‘farer’.

I have lived in India long enough to speak decent Hindi, as I just demonstrated; I take full responsibility for the conjecture about the etymology of ‘Rastafarian’, which just occurred to me while editing this essay. Both my sister and I are married to Indians, Shavite Brahmin Hindus, as are many sadhus. I was so ingrained in Indian society that I even had the honor of hosting their Miss India Pageant once. I can assure you that no sadhu would mind a white Burner sporting his style of dreads, just as he wouldn’t issues with Rastafarians, his fellow rasta-farers. His first question would be, “Are you in meditation?” which is what the dreads signify. After a response in the affirmative, he’d hand the guy or girl a traditional conical stone ganja pipe to smoke, like the kind Bob Marley used.

When Beyoncé’s concert film came out a few months ago, people rightly accused her of another common double standard: the widespread African-American appropriation of Ancient Egyptian culture. Any claim American Blacks have to that civilization has been soundly debunked by all academics; they were Arabs, not Sub-Saharan Blacks, just as they are today. Billboards dotted all around Hollywood showed Beyoncé dressed as Nefertiti, but reconstructions of the Egyptian Queen all show she looked more like Sophia Loren than Regina King.

However, nobody was actually accusing Beyoncé of doing anything wrong, just of cultural-appropriation hypocrisy, calling out the woke, an African-American movement that has now spilled out from the Black community to cloak America, and Britain to a lesser degree, with its toxic shadow.

Beyoncé looked amazing as Nefertiti. Queen Bey rules American culture with influence and power beyond the scope of Nefertiti’s imagination. Beyoncé can dress herself as Marie Antoinette for all I care; or, more appropriately for my specific niche, as Mary Queen of Scots. Beyoncé is gorgeous inside and out, wildly talented, not just as a singer but as a filmmaker, the inheritor of a long line of culturally influential Black female performers that dates back to a time before my parents were born, or before anyone still alive today.

There is no art without appropriation; there is no language, no fashion, no architecture, no science, no technology, no culture without appropriation. Clothing is a costume we don to mark ourselves as members of our particular tribe, or to set ourselves apart from it, as I do. The culture we are born into dictates our behavior according to the narratives passed down by our forefathers. We have the right and the freedom to subtract or add to those narratives as we see fit, to pay homage to other narratives we like, to turn the Golden Fleece into a polo player that spins gold, without fear of being screamed at, of being vilified, of being called out and canceled, of being accused of supremacy when we’re just like anyone struggling to get through the challenges of life as best we can.

The difference between blackface and dressing as a Native American at Halloween is that blackface was a cruel, satirical form of theater that deliberately mocked Blacks as being an inferior race. That is discrimination; that is racism. But blackface hasn’t been performed for as long as my parents and I have been alive, unlike sitcoms like Modern Family, which portray people like me as stereotypical hysterical queens; having said that, that’s also fine by me — I know plenty of hysterical queens, most of them woke as fuck, so go right ahead and stereotype all you want.

The reason I am taking the time to take down cultural appropriation, and the greater Woke Inquisition by extension, is because its proponents are so wrapped up in their hate-filled sanctimonious righteousness that they can’t see the forest for the trees. They are causing vast amounts of damage to the Democratic party with midwestern Whites who are going to determine whether Trump is reelected or not. It’s not because these people are racist; we need to keep in mind that they are the ones who elected Obama, not Blacks living in urban areas that for the most part are already blue. Most of these people have never met a Black person to be prejudiced against, much less an immigrant. But what they see and hear of the Woke Inquisition has led them to believe there is a very real war on Whites, and they are not wrong. They see it as unfair and unfounded, and they are not wrong. It galls them when they hear themselves being called “privileged” when they feel as downtrodden as everyone else, when they can’t get work, can’t pay medical bills, and they are not wrong.

Forgive the fully intended pun, but if people want to carry on with this dangerous, destructive woke silliness, it is no skin off my back. With Obama having finally dropped the hammer on “woke political correctness,” and reasonable Liberal thinkers like Bill Maher tearing it down at any opportunity, woke is going to die, hopefully within a few months. Nobody is going to make me surrender my very real white privilege by harassing or canceling me; “privilege is a huge part of who you are,” a Cuban friend observed when we were discussing this, as I have made exhaustively clear in the first part of this article.

But if woke doesn’t die, if its disciples opt for cognitive dissonance over sanity and truth, and double down on their words and actions, then Trump will win another term. And it isn’t just awful “Magats” who put him there; it is equally hideous Liberals who are accusing hundreds of millions of Americans of crimes they are not guilty of, simply by having been born with a lack of melanin — that is the definition of racism right there.

The worst thing about Woke Inquisition: It has accomplished nothing. Because we are not living in anything close to the pre-Civil War South, or Weimar Germany, or even in the Civil Rights era, when there were tangible, urgent social issues to be fixed. Pulling sneakers off the market because the Revolutionary Flag triggered poor Colin Kaepernick is nobody’s definition of an urgent social issue, but do you know how that plays in the Midwest?

If you think I’m just another racist, privileged, out-of-touch old white male, I accept your judgment. But what if Daddy O, Bill Maher and I are right? Is this new toxic “social justice” religion worth it if it gets Trump elected again? What if the Heartland is likewise right and the Woke Inquisition is the actual cause of why they’re going to vote for him, despite his many vices and corruptions, because the woke are a worse danger to the country than he is? Can you live with that, presuming you could even accept this reality in the first place?

As of this writing, Donald Trump Jr.’s book “Triggered” entered at number one on the NY Times nonfiction bestseller list. It’s time to woke the fuck down and wake the fuck up.