After more than two years out of the game, the Swiss-owned French heritage tennis label Lacoste—the one with the crocodile, of course—bounced back into Paris this afternoon with a show served up at Stade Roland Garros.
Leading Lacoste’s return is Pelagia Kolotouros, a career pro on the fashion circuit: past tours include stints working on Beyoncé’s Ivy Park, Yeezy, and with Pharrell (all Adidas joints) as well as at The North Face. Speaking before this collection showed on the hallowed clay of Court Philippe Chatrier—Paris’s equivalent of Wimbledon’s Centre Court—the Parsons-trained New Yorker talked a good game. “We want to own tennis,” she said.
But never mind le tennis, what about la mode? On a rammed Paris Fashion Week finale day that included Chanel, Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent (menswear), the returning Lacoste was always going to be a wild card. It turns out that Lacoste’s latest incarnation held an activation party in New York last September, in order to seed Kolotouros’s take on founder René Lacoste’s 1927 New York victory in the Davis Cup as part of a generational French team that was popularly named The Four Musketeers. Upon their return to Paris, Roland Garros was constructed in order to provide a venue for the Cup’s defense, so holding today’s Lacoste show here—as Kolotouros’s predecessor Louise Trotter once also did—made heritage-brand sense.
The collection we saw was rammed full of René-related Easter eggs for those who count themselves aficionados of the brand’s origin story. Models carried croc-effect briefcases after the one Lacoste once challenged his trainer to buy him if he proved victorious in a Boston tournament. It was that case that led to Lacoste’s nickname of The Crocodile, an identifier he happily played up to by commissioning the now-famous logo. Dresses and patches on T-shirts featured photoprints from a Lacoste-penned tennis guide, and others featuring shots of him at the net. In terms of integrating the language of tennis more materially into the collection, there was a voluminous green coat whose bouclé-meets-terry texture was reminiscent of a tennis ball (or grass court). Pleats were highlighted by Kolotouros, and featured in a green leather tennis-ish skirt and pleat sided handbags. There were also some handsome old-school piped racket bags, croc print silk shirting and dresses, volumized and sheeny long-sleeve variations of the brand’s canonically preppy polo shirt (along with matching track pants), and cropped knit v-neck cricket sweaters and dresses after the style adopted by 1920s tennis players.
Lacoste is the only brand competing on the luxury fashion circuit that is so comprehensively rooted in a single sporting pursuit. As both Louise Trotter and the brand’s even earlier runway player Felipe Oliveira Baptista also discovered, the obligation to reflect that origin story can lead to an endless rally of tennis metaphors both figurative (such as today’s pleated green skirt) or slightly more abstract (the section of white or printed silk dresses). When your fashion narrative will always be viewed in such a specific context, serving up a blistering sartorial ace represents a unique challenge. However Kolotouros’s first-season set seemed a promising warmer-upper. And the Lacoste sneaker ads plastered across the Paris metro—plus talk of a new flagship store to open in Manhattan sooner rather than later—suggest that the brand intends to dedicate plenty of energy to backing this latest, Kolotouros-led push to climb the fashion rankings.