Ralph Lauren has re-upped. The 68-year-old fashion designer, who celebrated his 40th year in business last fall, recently told the Los Angeles Times that he’s still in it to win it: open new stores, launch new brands, develop new lines for J.C. Penney, expand his business.

He very pragmatically explained, “This is a public company and I have to perform. The stockholders count on it.”

Now that Ralph will still be with us, I’d like to vent a long-held pet peeve: fashionistas, who should know better, pronouncing his last name lau-WREN, as if he were right off the Rue de Rivoli. The fact is, the boy born Ralph Lifschitz in 1939 was not from the French quarter of the Bronx. The name he assumed for himself 40 years ago has the more American pronunciation LÔR-en. (It rhymes, ironically, with “foreign.”)

I know people who attended a summer camp in the Catskills with Ralph Lifschitz in the 1950s. The story goes that one year, Lifschitz was the captain of one of the color war teams. Most captains assemble their teams and distribute assignments: “Here’s the softball lineup, you guys will do archery, you’re the swimmers.” Lifschitz reportedly gathered his team and said: “We’ll wear navy alligator shirts with white shorts to assembly and blue oxford button-downs with khakis and penny loafers to dinner.” The best-dressed team also won the war that year. And a couple of decades later, his polo pony had replaced the alligator on the chest of America’s casual knitted shirt of choice.

One of those fellow campers saw Lifschitz on a Manhattan sidewalk a few years after camp. “Ralph, what are you doing these days?” the friend asked. “Selling ties,” was the reply. Yes, he sure was. Working for Beau Brummell, a necktie manufacturer, he wanted his own line of wider ties in higher-end fabrics. The company gave him a drawer in the showroom, he called the line Polo – and himself Ralph Lauren – and sold $500,000 worth of ties that first year, 1967. I remember owning one: It was sea-blue and silky with yellow anchors on it.

So who cares how his acquired name is pronounced? Even beyond my journalist’s desire for accuracy, I find it odd that this most-American of designers is given a French twist, as if that authenticates him. He made a national reputation by designing the clothes for the movies “The Great Gatsby” (in 1974) and “Annie Hall” (1977). Hard to imagine two more American themes than those two films.

His celebrated ad campaigns of aspiration center on the mansions of Rhode Island, the polo fields of Connecticut, the ranches and mountains of the great West. Couldn’t be more American than that.

This is one fashion icon who simply doesn’t need a French connection.