If you follow home decorating trends and have a social media account, I am willing to bet good money that you’ve come across the Ralph Lauren Christmas trend.
On Pinterest, find boards filled with inspiration: red-and-green tartan, lush garlands, tapered candles and holly stems weighted down with red berries. On Instagram and TikTok, find the how-tos, with users showing how they — long before Thanksgiving — have already decorated or plan to, breaking it down for other users and highlighting budget-friendly finds to help create the aesthetic for less.
At its core, the trend emphasizes a controlled look, Molly Moorkamp, a former Ralph Lauren employee, explained in a TikTok video. Plaids unmixed (black watch, tartans), wrapped boxes (no gift bags), and no overhead lighting (soft accent glows only). In a word, subtlety. “We’re speaking, ‘merry Christmas,’ not printing it on a sign,” Moorkamp quipped in the video.
Design consultant Preston Konrad, another Ralph Lauren alum, touted thick ropes of scotch pine garlands, tartan lampshades and candle hurricanes in a multivideo series of his own.
The trend comes as Ralph Lauren recaptures shoppers
This particular holiday decor obsession, which saw Google searches peak in early November, is, perhaps, one we could’ve seen coming. Google Trends reports that searches for “Ralph Lauren” have rebounded from a 2017 rock bottom — right around the time that the company launched its “New Way Forward” restructuring plan and leadership change-up after falling stock prices and revenue growth.
Similarly, Ralph Lauren’s stock price has risen steadily over the past few years — the company relayed “better-than-expected second quarter” earnings Nov. 6 — as it woos a Gen Z customer base driven by a pervasive desire for the preppy, old-money aesthetics associated with heritage brands like Ralph Lauren.
Analytics firm ListenFirst tied that interest to a Trump-era aesthetic of “conservative-coded consolidation (tradition, analog living).”
“Even in 2025, interior trends echo this cultural lean. ‘Ralph Lauren Christmas’ takes over Pinterest — masculine-coded tradition in tartan, dark wood, and legacy warmth,” ListenFirst's marketing director wrote on Oct. 30. “It’s the home decor counterpart to 2024’s Nancy Meyers kitchens: both fantasies of heritage, order, and permanence.”
Ralph Lauren Christmas 'hearkens back to a more analog time'
For home decorators, there’s less to it: The style is simply appealing.
“There are very few people out there who do a Christmas fantasy better than Ralph Lauren,” said Robert Khederian, author of the design-focused Substack Second Story.
Khederian, another Ralph Lauren alum and self-described lover of traditional design, is a sucker for “that sort of cozy, maximalist aesthetic” associated with the trend, and he finds its roots in nostalgia interesting.
“On social media right now, there is renewed appreciation for the 1990s, for the early 2000s, like a time before we were chronically online,” Khederian said. “And I don’t think that it’s unrelated that we have this momentary surge of appreciation for a ‘Ralph Lauren Christmas’ because it hearkens back to a more analog time.”
For Gen Z decorators who grew up in an often-lonely digital world and crave lasting environments, that pre-internet world is part of their fantasy.
He also finds it interesting that a yearning born of “that exhaustion from the constant churn of consumerism” is a social media trend — something fated to come on strong, sell items, and then fade quickly.
“The kind of transient piece that you buy to hop on the trend, knowing full well that this piece probably won’t last you long” is “to me like the antithesis of a Ralph Lauren Christmas,” Khederian explained.
Instead, he noted, the trend might capture a “desire to refocus on investment pieces, like things that will last for generations and not be just so of the moment.”
As Preston Konrad put it: “It’s more about the storytelling and the styling than what you’re buying.”