Lacoste

Lacoste opened in 1933 in Paris, founded by seven-time Grand Slam tennis champion René Lacoste and French knitwear manufacturer André Gillier. The original product was the L.12.12 polo shirt, a short-sleeved piqué cotton garment Lacoste had designed for himself in the late 1920s to replace the long-sleeved dress shirts players wore on court.

The shirt carried a small embroidered crocodile on the chest, a nod to the nickname American sportswriters gave Lacoste in 1923. The brand is widely credited as the first to put a visible logo on the outside of a garment.

Menswear has always been the heart of the business, starting with that single polo and expanding through the decades into tennis knitwear, cotton piqué in new colors from the 1950s, cable sweaters, tailored sportswear, and leather goods. Bernard Lacoste, René’s son, ran the company from 1963 to 2005 and broadened the range into footwear, eyewear, and fragrance.

That sporting aesthetic positioned Lacoste alongside Fred Perry, Sergio Tacchini, and Fila as one of the European houses that built the modern sportswear wardrobe, and by the late 1970s and through the 1980s the crocodile became the signature polo of the preppy wardrobe in the United States, licensed through Izod and name-checked in Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 Official Preppy Handbook.

Swiss family-held group Maus Frères acquired full ownership of Lacoste in 2012, valuing the company at €1 billion. Christophe Lemaire led creative direction from 2001 to 2010, followed by Felipe Oliveira Baptista, Louise Trotter from 2018 to 2023, and Pelagia Kolotouros, formerly of Adidas, Yeezy, The North Face, and Calvin Klein menswear, who took over as creative design director in 2023 and showed her debut collection on Roland Garros center court in 2024.

Novak Djokovic succeeded René himself as brand ambassador in 2017, called the new crocodile in the announcement. Today Lacoste dresses the broad menswear shopper through polos, tennis-inflected knitwear, tailored sportswear, and footwear, sitting in the premium sportswear tier alongside Fred Perry and Sunspel. It holds a near-century position as the brand that invented the polo shirt and made the embroidered logo part of the menswear canon.