Earlier this week, Ralph Lauren released a five-minute animation of its company mascot, the Polo Bear, carrying out an art heist. The Polo Bear is no ordinary bear. He has quite the résumé, from tennis player to barista, track athlete to champion skier. He takes on these roles with a sense of relaxed sophistication and WASP luxury – he makes a particularly excellent study of a vacationing jock, with relaxed trousers and trench coat over a Polo jumper with shirt and tie. He is, for many, a figure of charming cuteness. No one would suspect this bear of any misdemeanour.
Perhaps this is the motivation for recasting the Polo Bear as a super thief in The Polo Bear Chronicles: Operation Black Tie. It is worth clarifying that Ralph Lauren is not endorsing art theft as a way of life. While the Polo Bear enjoys exceptional houses in New York City and the Hamptons (blue and white colour scheme, muslin curtains blowing in the breeze, a guitar resting on a chair for a casual fireside strum), there is no suggestion that they were financed by some grizzly felony. A shot of a newspaper article quickly establishes that Renoir’s Figures on the Beach (1890) has been stolen from the Met by some nefarious figure.
While many viewers might see the Polo Bear’s tuxedo and think of Mission: Impossible (1996), Rakewell can’t help but feel that Ralph Lauren had a different inspiration in mind. The scene where the Polo Bear negotiates laser sensors to get to the painting, a quick spray of scent revealing the presence of invisible laser beams, pays homage not so much to the Tom Cruise vehicle as to the more art-centred crime thriller Entrapment (1999), starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery. Rakewell is sure that many viewers will remember the scene in which Zeta-Jones’s insurance investigator has to practise dodging the beams with tense control.
The final scene of Operation Black Tie moves us into another sensibility altogether. Is the sight of the Polo Bear sitting in the Met enjoying the work of art in its rightful home anything other than pure Thomas Crown? Never has the Polo Bear been better dressed to appeal to the New York cognoscenti heading for their own holidays in the Hamptons. No doubt, as the city’s art-world elite enjoy their martinis on the beach, they will particularly enjoy the fantasy of being able to trade in the traffic jams for a helicopter to Long Island. Once there they can take in the air exactly as the figures on Renoir’s beach do, untroubled by real-world affairs – least of all a bear market.
