When Jocy and Trae Little Sky put out their first collection with Polo Ralph Lauren last November, the question in a lot of group chats was whether it would be a one-off: a single capsule, a nice press cycle, and back to business as usual. It wasn’t. The second drop of Polo Ralph Lauren x TÓPA landed in North America on August 18 and globally after August 20, and it makes the case that the first one was a starting point rather than a finish line.
The Little Skys are a wife-and-husband team, both award-winning artists and designers, both accomplished Pow Wow dancers, and both very good at making people look twice. Jocy is an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations and is also Dakota. Trae is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Stoney Nakoda Nations. Together they founded TÓPA, and together they became the first Indigenous-led brand, not just individual artists, invited into Ralph Lauren’s Artist in Residence program.
The beadwork isn’t an accent this time
The most obvious shift between drop one and drop two is how much hand-beadwork there is, and where it sits. It’s not tucked at a cuff. It’s the point.
Beaded work runs across Polo shirt styles, footwear and the accessories that Ralph Lauren customers already recognize on sight, like the Polo ID and Polo Play bag silhouettes, and a beaded belt carrying star and cloud motifs, the sky above mirrored onto the land below. Jackets, bags and boots pick up cascading fringe that moves with the wearer. Anyone who has beaded a single rosette knows what a fully beaded belt costs in hours; putting that on a mass-market luxury shelf is a different kind of statement than putting a print on it.
Working with Ralph Lauren’s design teams, Jocy and Trae held onto beading layouts and techniques specific to their own practice rather than letting them get flattened into a generic “Native-inspired” pattern. That distinction is the whole reason a program like this either works or doesn’t.
Plant Relatives are the collection’s spine
Drop two is organized around the relationship between people, land and Plant Relatives.
Sage, cedar, sweetgrass, tobacco, prairie crocus and wild turnip show up as floral motifs, seeds and medicinal plants across polos, footwear and accessories. Celestial symbols sit alongside them. Geometric motifs in deep, saturated color pull from the Northern Plains landscape itself, and mirrored, symmetrical compositions carry the balance between earth and sky.
The product names say it out loud: the Shimmering Sage Jacket, the Strong Sage Polo, the Singing Blossoms Polo, the Rooted Medicine Sneaker, the Leather Medicine Boot, the Medicine Seed Crossbody, the Earth’s Embrace beaded belt, the Wícozani Polo Play Crossbody. These are teachings, and they made it onto the hangtag.
This collaboration with Polo Ralph Lauren honors our community, culture and way of life, and we hope it inspires people to be proud of who they are, where they come from and to follow their dreams.
Jocy Little Sky, co-founder of TÓPA
For the first time, the program makes clothes for kids
Drop two spans: accessories, footwear, men’s, women’s, and, for the first time in the Artist in Residence program, children’s apparel.
That matters more than it might sound. Native kids grow up seeing themselves as costumes or mascots. A Northern Plains beadwork layout designed by two Oceti Sakowin artists, made in a kid’s size, sold on the same site as everything else, is a small correction to that. It also means a parent and a child can match pieces.
Where the money goes
Five percent of the purchase price of every item in the Polo Ralph Lauren x TÓPA collection is donated to the Ralph Lauren x TÓPA Scholarship Program of the American Indian College Fund, supporting Native American and Indigenous Studies at select Tribal Colleges and Universities.
It’s worth noting what changed: the first drop directed proceeds to Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation’s Lakota language and education work. This one funds tuition at TCUs. Both are community-facing, and both are the part of these partnerships that outlasts the collection.
The campaign, and the details around it
The campaign imagery features Quannah ChasingHorse (Hän Gwich’in, Oglala Lakota, Sičangu Lakota) in the Shimmering Sage Jacket, the Polo Bears Sweater, the Leather Medicine Boot and the Wild Blossom Polo ID Bag. Several looks are styled with silver by Neil Zarama (Chiricahua Apache Nation), who works with Ralph Lauren through the company’s Authentic Makers program, a nice bit of cross-pollination between two different tracks of the same effort.
How to get it
The Polo Ralph Lauren x TÓPA drop two collection is available now in North America on RalphLauren.com, in the Ralph Lauren app and at select Ralph Lauren stores, and globally after August 20 on RalphLauren.com and at select stores. It’s also carried at 4topa4.com, at Bloomingdale’s 59th Street in New York and Century City in Los Angeles, and on Bloomingdales.com.
The collection
Images courtesy of Ralph Lauren.
