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Fashion mogul Ralph Lauren has come a long way from selling neckties at Macy's—check out his garage, above, which is chock-full of Ferraris from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 90s. He also owns a cadre of super-rare vehicles including "a 1938 Bugatti coupe, a 1938 Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia roadster, and the world’s only 1930 Mercedes-Benz SSK “Count Trossi” roadster." Vanity Fair gets a sneak peek inside Lauren's car lair:
Lauren does not collect art—“You can’t drive a painting,” he said to me—and he makes much of his desire to treat his cars as more than just aesthetic objects. “I drive these cars—they don’t just sit here,” he said at least three times as we walked through two floors of classic Porsches, Ferraris, Morgans, Jaguars, Aston Martins, and Mercedes-Benzes. He loves the fact that every car he has bought has a history, whether as a racing car or as a prototype or, as with his 1971 Mercedes 280SE, in his own life. He bought the Mercedes for $13,000 not long after he had begun his business as an independent designer. It was an extravagance that offended his backers, given how far from profitability he was then, but Lauren saw it as a chance to make a statement. “I walked into Mercedes on Park Avenue and said I wanted that car, but with a tan top and tan leather seats and a silver body,” he said. “They told me that they didn’t make it that way. But then they did it.”· A Vroom of His Own [Vanity Fair]
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