NEW YORK – With a pure white graphic look and spacious pockets, the uniforms that Team USA will wear during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Tokyo will be unveiled on Wednesday by the official outfit Ralph Lauren.
The uniforms, along with the Ralph Lauren-designed Olympic Village apparel for American athletes, were ready to go when the Games were postponed last summer due to the pandemic.
“It looks like we’re all gone now,” David Lauren, the company’s brand and innovation chief, told The Associated Press before the unveiling. “They are designed, manufactured and ready to roll.”
The Games are now scheduled to open on July 23 and through August 8, as organizers continue to figure out how to hold on to the pandemic that is still raging and only 100 days left. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren is ready to open and close the parade equipment for the more than 600 athletes of the US team, those participating in the Paralympic Games and Olympic-themed items sold to the public.
Opening ceremony uniforms will be launched in July.
Lauren, son of the founder of the fashion giant, said that sustainability is important in this Olympic film.
Ralph Lauren, who has been outfitting Team USA since 2008, is working with Dow on a cotton dyeing process 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 to the use of plant materials and agricultural products without synthetic plastic, was used for a patch on the closing ceremony’s white stretch denim pants, made from cotton made in the USA. And like the lightweight pull jacket, a striped red, white and blue strap worn by the athletes comes in part from recycled plastic bottles.
The dots are already a reminder of the historic Olympic delay: they say ‘Team USA’ with the year 2020 printed in red.
The white zippered jackets feature dark blue collars and hoods, and striped red, white and blue shackles. An American flag spot is on one arm and the “USA” on the other, the latter is also under one leg. The athletes will wear a classic white Polo shirt, white sneakers with a stripe design and navy masks that are also made of American cotton.
The company’s Olympic retail collection will be on sale from Wednesday at RalphLauren.com and in June at select Ralph Lauren stores, select US department stores and online at TeamUSAShop.com. All proceeds support Team USA.
“We want our athletes to really be ambassadors for American style, culture and sportsmanship,” Lauren said recently via Zoom of Manhattan. “We also understood that the message for the Olympics is about sustainability, that it would be the most sustainable Olympics in history and an opportunity for the team to show ingenuity in new ways of thinking about our environment. “
Daryl Homer, a silver medalist in saber fencing at the 2016 Games, hopes to make his third Olympic appearance. He was one of the three candidates from Tokyo who modeled the closing uniforms for the AP in the Polo Ralph Lauren store in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
The 30-year-old Homer says the Olympic delay was sometimes difficult, with a year of free competition.
“I feel pretty prepared,” he said. “I’m getting ready as best I can, given the situation. I’m just glad there’s a Games.”
Homer, who lived in Harlem during the pandemic, used his stop to ” be a normal person and walk a little outside the sport. I read, I went for a walk, I ran, I tried to stay in good shape. I tried to just be present where I was. ‘
Jordyn Barratt, a Honolulu resident who now lives in San Diego, was also on hand to show off the uniforms. The skateboarder hoping to make the Olympic team for the first time now that her sport has been added, said: “It’s all started to feel really good in the last month or so. It feels a lot more real and a lot more stressful.”
The 22-year-old has nationals, a pro-stop and a world championship to go before the Olympics, without competition since November 2019.
“It’s done great things for women’s skateboarding. It’s a very masculine sport,” said Barratt, a park skateboarding specialist, about the Olympic nod to her field.
And Barratt is delighted with the chance to possibly travel to Tokyo with her childhood friend, fellow skateboarder, Olympic rival and world champion Heimana Reynolds, a native of Honolulu who moved to San Diego in November 2019 before the pandemic hit. .
“I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, just saw her at the skate park and we would just go skating together all the time,” said Reynolds, also 22, and a skateboarder in the park. “We never really thought we were going to go skateboarding that far. It’s very cool that we competed from childhood skating friends to the global journey, and now beyond.
“She was probably like the first girl skateboarder I saw,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, it’s really cool to have girls out there skating.’
Reynolds, Barratt joked, was the “good-good-kid” who grew up.
Lauren noted that the Olympics will be the first time since the pandemic began that the “world has come together again.” He calls the Games a ‘party coming out’ with a sense of hope that we all need in our lives right now. ‘
Like other Olympic fans, Lauren is disappointed to miss the Tokyo Games. Organizers have decided that spectators overseas are not allowed. He attended the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, London and Atlanta.
“It’s one of the great experiences in my life, to see all these teams come together, to see the energy. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” he said. “If you’re personally there, it’s electric.
“There is a feeling,” he said, “that we are all one.”