What a Croc. After nearly 15 years on tour—mostly in New York—Lacoste returned to show in Paris this morning. The move to an open-air court in the Tuileries (oddly, laid out more like a basketball court) was putatively to celebrate the 85th anniversary of its founding by René Lacoste, a brilliant tennis player forced into early retirement at 25 years old.
Way back when, Lacoste invented the pique L.12.12 polo shirt to more freely bash backhands. This proved a powerful money spinner—especially once affixed with the embroidered logo in honor of his nickname, “the Crocodile,” given to him after he bet the French Davis Cup coach a crocodile-skin bag.
That shirt, one of the first garments given an external logo (Jantzen’s lovely “Diving Girl” preceded it), has become a central piece in the canon of 20th-century casual wear. In the 21st century, Felipe Oliveira Baptista has ably stewarded the brand for several years now, dancing around athleisure and logomania while ushering in plenty of postmodern deconstructions of the crocodile in collaboration with artists and graphic designers.
Post-show, Baptista said this was a “past, present, future” collection. Lacoste’s origin story was evident in not just the polo shirts but the cricket sweaters and the double-breasted gold-buttoned blazers that were once favored by René. Here, they were turned into mid-length armless top coats and dresses and delivered in slouchier-than-their-original-form versions on the models. For the more recent past, Baptista cited as inspiration two mid-’90s films that linked the banlieues to the bourgeoisie, La Haine and Conte D’Été.
This sweet mix saw white loafers combined with retro tracksuits—some dubiously worn open at the shoulder—and wide, lightly bleached denim on a louche-looking male cast, often mustachioed and wrapped in aviators. Articulated knees, elasticated-cuff dark denim for women, plus flat-out mom jeans were worn with cricket sweaters, nasty-cool cagoules, off-the-shoulder sports tops, and aerobics-age ’80s croc-stamped sneakers. Another collaboration spawned some pleasant prints of entwined crocs, letters, and tennis balls used in off-the-shoulder frilled-neckline dresses—a tic transferred to a polo-shirt mini dress and wide-shoulder blazer dresses. At the end came a fine rally of deconstructed polo-shirt dresses in pastel. Lacoste totally owns that shirt. Yet the casting, styling, and sometimes the clothes themselves made this freshly-returned -home label’s show feel tangentially (albeit diluted-ly) akin to two far younger homegrown brands, the menswear schedule’s Pigalle and AMI. The positive spin is this serves as evidence that Lacoste, though Swiss-owned and for so long in New York, retains an authentically French soul.
