Fashion: Snow? Who needs it: You can ski, climb or sail in Ralph Lauren's sportswear, but most of it won't get nearer to the piste than Bond Street or Madison Avenue, says Marion Hume

It may surprise you that the sleek, sexy, aerodynamic silver ski-racing suit you see here on the far right is by that master of romance and nostalgia, Ralph Lauren.

Think Ralph Lauren and you are more likely to conjure up costume drama and delightful pillagings of the past. After all, the American designer has built a personal fortune of around dollars 700m offering clothing that is always acceptable, largely because you always sense that you have seen something like it somewhere before.

Ralph has taken hold of history, both British and American (latterly even Russian and French Indo-Chinese, too), reinterpreted it, then sold it back, coals-to-Newcastle style, for big bucks. He has done it with such panache that even the Royals have been sighted in his chintz prints., which somehow look appropriately regal.

But with the new Polo Sport line, Ralph has gone modern - at least in a James Bond, futurist kind of way. Alongside clothes in which to recline on a chaise-longue (from Polo Ralph Lauren) and kit for mucking out the stables (from his rugged Double RL label) comes the new line of do-or-dare sportswear, available now in the US and from Polo Sport shops planned to open in Europe soon.

You really could climb crags, ski the slopes and sail stormy seas in most of the pieces. Alternatively, you could wear them for shopping on Bond Street or on New York's Madison Avenue, where the flagship Polo Sport store stands in minimalist Bauhaus splendour. Bang opposite is Ralph's mansion, the Rhinelander, not a home but a shop, where all the olde worlde clothes are on sale.

Crossing the road from one to the other is like walking out of the set of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence across a century into The Living Daylights. There are the cherry-wood floors of a beautiful boat; the huge fireplace of a ski lodge you could never afford to rent; the lobby of a gym with astronomical annual fees; all rolled into one vast and alluring shop open to everyone.

Buffy Birrittella, the senior vice-president of womenswear design, is keen to stress that the new offering is genuine active sportswear. It was born, she says, from a fashion collection, autumn/winter 1991, when the inspiration was military skiers and Ice Station Zebra.

'People wanted to buy the bodysuits (which were slick, lipstick-red) for skiing. They were fed up with lime green and dayglo pink and so was I' The fashion suits weren't intended to be worn above the snow belt, so to fulfil a need, research started on high-performance, breathable, water-resistant fabrics, and Polo Sport was born.

Where the arbiter of taste extraordinaire leads, others follow. Donna Karan, who, with Calvin Klein, is Lauren's arch-rival in New York, is talking about an active golfwear capsule collection. Then there are the sports companies, giants such as Nike, who could swallow Ralph Lauren's dollars 1.2bn business as chicken-feed, who will watch Lauren with the caution that Goliath should have afforded David.

Sales in Madison Avenue are reportedly way up on projections. There, ski unitards come topped with fencers' corsets, both for support and 'so that she looks sexy and curvy apres-ski, when she throws off the top layers', explains Charles Fagin, the store's manager. There are huge parkas, snug jogging pants and chiselled, shaped sweaters, the kind people try to pinch from ski instructors because they never seem to be on sale anywhere.

Lauren's greatest skill has been to interpret the longings of his time. When Americans wanted history, he fed it to them. Now the buzz is health, grittiness, sport. Nike's 'just do it' ethos hits an American nerve: Ralph Lauren has come up with more aesthetically pleasing clothes to 'just do it' in. Nothing in the Polo Sport universe is nasty-shiny, or purple, or green.

There are also clothes in which you are not intended to do much at all. Nobody is going to sail the high seas in a yellow slicker made of patent leather, for dollars 1,500. And much of the active ski-wear will find itself no closer to the piste than Bond Street. Therein lies the skill: as Charles Fagin puts it, 'a lot of people care less about what they do, than that they look right doing it'.

In Polo Sport, even couch potatoes could look Olympian.

There's another side to this. Ralph Lauren is the first upper-echelon designer to do this kind of sportswear. But active sportswear, worn away from the activities for which it was designed, has become a street style norm. Tough street kids wear the gear of their sporting heroes so that they too look like heroes, like winners on the street. Ralph Lauren's clothes always carry a myth. The message of Polo Sport is that, like street sportswear, it is urban armour: you'll feel fitter, stronger, braver, tougher for fighting the battles of daily life if you are wearing it.

In Polo Sport, you can symbolically take on the strength of an athlete without the agony. There is nothing in the store to remind you of your flab. Banks of videos play surfing, sailing, skiing fantasies at a distance, but unlike in sports shops, there is no equipment, no instruments of torture to remind you of pain and gain, no Cindy Crawford sweating and pumping in close-up and chiding you for not joining in. At Polo Sport, you don't have to do it, you just buy the next size up.

The full Polo Sport collection is currently available only through the Polo Sport flagship, 888 Madison Avenue, New York (010 1 212 434 8000). For inquiries, call the London store (071-4914967).

(Photographs omitted)