The rhetoric around this Lacoste show was about sustainability, conservation, and humanity. In his lengthy notes, Felipe Oliveira Baptista relayed the interesting story of how René Lacoste was instrumental in planting 125 acres of forest on land belonging to the family of his wife, Simone Thion de la Chaume. This project happened during World War II. The property is just on the French side of the Pyrenees: Basque country that would have then been under the deeply dubious Vichy “government.” De la Chaume’s father, also called René, had founded a golf course named Chantaco on the land in 1928—one of the main reasons his daughter and son-in-law planted that forest was to spare its workers enforced deportation to Nazi Germany.
Baptista added in those notes that this collection marked the inauguration of a capsule project in partnership with a conservation charity that will see the famous Lacoste crocodile embroidery replaced with 10 extremely at-risk species on a run of 10 polo shirts. The species include the vaquita (30 remain, apparently), the Javan rhinoceros (67), the California condor (231), and the Cao Vit gibbon (150). As Baptista said of the project in his notes: “This is our way of planting trees in 2018.”
This show started late enough to have time to double-check the forest story (Chantaco’s website said the forest contains 40,000 trees, while the Lacoste notes upped that by 10,000, but hey) and to observe Lacoste waiters serving guests coffee and hot chocolate in one-drink, plastic-lidded paper cups.
When this collection finally reached the tee, Baptista showed us some impressive sportswear strokeplay. The collection cut and sliced between ’80s and ’90s retro, for the most part nicely done, and had a more distant, imaginative-excursion-to-an-imagined-casual-landed-gentry vibe. The opening look mixed cagoules with capes—evening cagoules?—over velvet pants and boots made with Aigle, one of France’s prime snob Wellington bootmakers. Rarely was a head not bucket-hat-clad. There were some very pleasant cable-knit sweater dresses, some carpet-ish jacquard pieces patterned with leaf shapes, and some great work with corduroy, including a should-be-wrong-looks-so-right pink-to-apricot shirtdress featuring a carpenter’s loop on the rear left pocket. There were lots of vintage Lacoste golf graphics. An action-shouldered jumpsuit was the only bogey here, although the decision to team Baptista’s clearly beloved, elasticated, and washed baggy denim with slingback kitten heels was, stylistically, uninterestingly discordant. With the exception of some overly back-in-the-day black leather blousons, some look-inside-out raincoats—just annoying in the real world—and a lovely topcoat featuring recurring gibbon silhouettes and a similarly vaquita-stamped tracksuit—imagine laboriously explaining those every time you wore them out and about—the menswear here was pretty great: Matchy-matchy cord looks worked well, and Baptista even made poly-something patched fleece outerwear feel real. A feel-good collection that looked (mostly) good too.
