Every fledgling businessman should study the career of Mr Ralph Lauren. Turning a tie-selling firm into a multi-billion-dollar company isn’t to be sniffed at. Early on, the designer realised that building a successful label was about much more than the product. “I don’t design clothes; I design dreams,” Mr Lauren once said, distilling the basics of branding into seven short words. True, he wasn’t responsible for the invention of the polo or Oxford shirt, but his preppy perspective on them has altered the American style landscape forever – it almost goes without saying – for the better.

The man known for his “detail-driven menswear” hadn’t planned on becoming a designer. He dropped out of NYU to enrol at Parsons School of Design with the intention of studying architecture. Thankfully, he had a change of heart, switched to fashion, and, less than a decade after graduating, was appointed the creative director of Gucci. Under his own eponymous label, which he founded in 2005, he’s built an empire of impeccable taste, spanning classic menswear and tailoring, grooming and some of the world’s most recognisable fragrances.

Calling Nike a sportswear company sells the brand short. Founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by Messrs Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, the brand’s initial ambition was to revolutionise sportswear technologies. Having achieved that twice over, at least, Nike has more recently positioned itself as a bona fide fashion giant. The most in-demand designers want to collaborate with it, while the biggest names want to wear it. And, with a product range spanning everything from socks to self-lacing sneakers, you can bag yourself a piece for the price of a latte.

“A time of steel, smoke and locomotives,” is how Carhartt bills 1889, the year Mr Hamilton Carhartt started making overalls for railroad workers in a cramped Detroit loft. More than a century on, the brand’s rough-and-ready workwear has stood the test of time. That’s partly because it’s extremely tough stuff – chore jackets, cargo trousers and other hardy wares – and partly because men’s wardrobes will always have a place for unfussy, timeless designs. The brand’s WIP (Work in Progress) offshoot was founded in the late 1980s by Mr Germans Edwin and Ms Salomée Faeh, who set out to translate the label’s perennial codes for the streetwear crowd with outsized silhouettes, graphic prints and a veritable who’s who of high-profile collaborations, without relinquishing an ounce of its authenticity.

A happy byproduct of the workwear trend’s growing popularity is that our wardrobes are now inherently more practical. Built in Minnesota to withstand the punishing climate, Red Wing Shoes made its first appearance more than a century ago, when Mr Charles Beckman realised that workmen would quite like shoes that were sturdy and comfortable. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that pairs such as its iconic Moc models are still going strong. Today, of course, they’re more likely to be worn with a turned-up pair of selvedge jeans and flannel shirt than overalls and a hard hat.

American tailoring might not enjoy quite the same prominence as its British or Italian counterparts, but Mr Thom Browne has contributed an enormous amount. After all, he’s arguably the reason we’re still wearing cropped trousers nearly 20 years after the designer debuted his signature “shrunken-fit” suits. Mr Browne, who was born and bred on the East Coast, also does a fine trade reinventing American classics – crisp button-down Oxfords, varsity sweats and other preppy staples – alongside playfully postmodern pieces, including madras “fun” shirts and leather bags fashioned after animal specimens, including penguins and the designer’s dachshund, Hector. It’s hardly a wonder that he’s won the hearts of the CFDA judges no less than three times.

Created in 1936 by eyewear firm Bausch & Lomb, Ray-Ban’s big break came when the US Air Force tasked the company with developing anti-glare lenses for pilots. The label’s aviators, as they became known, were a hit with the public, too, and its Wayfarers, which came later in 1952, cemented the brand as the undisputed king of sunglasses. Call it destiny, call it the undue influence of Mr Tom Cruise’s turns in Top Gun and Cocktail, but, despite frequent imitations, today nothing comes close to the real deal.

Nike might be the creator of the world’s most covetable sneakers, but the chances of any self-respecting sneakerhead taking a pair of OG Air Jordan II out of the box and onto the street are slim, to say the least. When it comes to kicks you can actually wear (and no doubt, you’ve already put a few pairs through their paces), Converse’s Chuck Taylor All-Stars take the top spot. The definitive cap-toe sneakers made their debut on basketball courts in the early 1920s and the design has hardly been touched since.

Witty, idiosyncratic, subversive and a bit of fun, the Stüssy clothing brand was created in California in the early 1980s as a means for its founder, Mr Shawn Stussy, to advertise his surfboard business. But what started as a graphic tee label quickly became a streetwear movement that attracted the surf, skate and all manner of subcultural enclaves in-between. “Wanna be in our gang?” Stüssy asked young Americans. The answer was, and still is, a resounding “yes”.