Time, please. The departure of Felipe Oliveira Baptista earlier this year, after a mammoth eight-year span as the designer in chief at Lacoste, has prompted France’s (albeit Swiss-owned) premier tennis brand to take a moment, towel down, hydrate, and consider the next chapter in its venerable croc-logoed progress.
These interregnum appointments can be deathly. But Lacoste, which will announce a new clothing design figurehead in due course, seems to be using its moment of exhalation wisely. It has appointed Marc Hare, who shuttered his Mr. Hare business back in 2016, to develop its shoe line in partnership with Pentland. Hare started out in 2009 as a designer of intuitively unconventional formal shoes but saw which way the wind was blowing and introduced some increasingly interesting sneaker designs under his own marque.
The clothing collection designed by Lacoste’s in-house teams for Spring is a piqué-based pot-au-feu, combining streetwear styling (as shot here by Craig McDean) with an ostensibly genderless categorization. The L1212 piqué polo—Lacoste’s supreme product—was shown in balloonish, oversize iterations tucked into pleated technical short shorts, pleated cotton mid-calf tennis skirts worn by women when René Lacoste used to play, grosgrain side-striped drill pants in blue, khakis, washed loose jeans, and some excellent nylon pin-tucked pants in scarlet—all pulled high on the waist.
The square logo on the white jersey tops teamed with croc side-stripe track pants was to signify Lacoste’s capsule collection with Roland Garros, with which it has an exclusive French Open partnership starting next year. The red-collar, white-on-black-pattern technical shirts were part of the performance collection soonish to be worn by its sponsored tennis athletes, including the mighty Novak Djokovic. The brand name was printed in a new whoosh-y, dynamic, action-font logo across denim bombers, jeans, and outsize T-shirts in a way we’ve seen many labels do in the past few years, but it didn’t look bad. Naturally, René’s embroidered crocodile logo—established as the brand’s symbol in honor of his nickname as a snappily tenacious professional tennis player—was everywhere, from sneakers and socks to pants (facing downward) and shirts (of course) and bucket hats.
Baptista did an excellent job honing Lacoste’s 21st-century identity via the medium of fashion shows. However, for those who liked some of the clothes he put on his runway enough to try and buy them, it was frustrating that they only very rarely seemed to make Lacoste’s retail network. All of this interim collection will go on sale. As the company gears up to get back on the show carousel next year, it would be great if it showed the same commercial commitment to whomever it gives the big job. New balls, please.
