Izod Men's Fashion Brand

Izod is a mid-range clothing company that produces dressy-casual clothing, sportswear for men, as well as footwear and accessories - the fullest brand record in the I letter. One warning comes first, in capitals: Izod and Lacoste are two DIFFERENT companies. Izod Lacoste was formerly a brand name of sportswear licensed to Izod by Lacoste from 1952 to 1993, and Izod and Lacoste both continue to produce similar piqué polo shirts, and are often mistakenly believed to be the same company. The distinction is visible on the chest: Lacoste polo shirts have the crocodile logo, while Izod has a monogram crest. Everything in Izod's modern identity follows from that forty-one-year pairing and its ending.

Izod of London would become most notable for its pairing with the Lacoste shirt company from 1952 to 1993. Vincent Draddy began to license the Lacoste shirt to add prestige to the Izod line, and Izod of London became a brand known simply as Izod Lacoste. While the shirts were equally Izod and Lacoste, they became abbreviated and popularised as Izod shirts - which led to the ongoing misunderstanding that the famous crocodile is the Izod trademark. A licensed shirt so successful that the public assigned its partner's emblem to Izod is the central fact of the brand's history: for four decades, the name Izod meant, in practice, the Lacoste-made polo.

The Split, the Sale and the Crest

During the early 1990s, Izod Lacoste struggled to maintain the market dominance it had enjoyed in previous decades. The initial reaction from Crystal Brands - Izod's parent company at the time - was to separate the two names and target two groups of customers at once: Izod was re-introduced as moderate price point apparel in department stores, while Lacoste was renamed Lacoste Chemise and re-positioned as a luxury lifestyle brand. Eventually this tactic did not provide the financial gain Crystal had hoped, and the license partnering ended in 1993. Sportloisirs S.A. purchased the Lacoste brand entirely in 1993, while Izod was sold to Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation in 1995.

Izod is part of PVH, forming part of its Heritage Brands division along with Van Heusen, Arrow, Warner's, Olga and Speedo - a heritage stable being exactly the right home for a name whose value is its history. And the garment that carries the name is unchanged in kind: Izod is perhaps best known for its short-sleeved piqué polo shirt, formerly produced by Lacoste and featuring the Lacoste crocodile on the left breast, now replaced with a color-matching or coordinating crest and left sleeve embroidery. One variation is the IZ patch instead of the crest. For a buyer, that sentence is a field guide: crocodile means Lacoste, crest - or IZ patch - means Izod, and the piqué polo both companies still make is their shared inheritance.

Reading This Izod Record

Read as a buying guide, Izod's history gives two tests. The identity test is the emblem: check the chest before the label, because the opening warning exists to stop a shopper mistaking one company's polo for the other's. The positioning test is the price point: the split of the early 1990s deliberately re-introduced Izod as moderate price point apparel in department stores, and its dressy-casual clothing, men's sportswear, footwear and accessories should be judged as mid-range clothing, bought for the polo-shirt heritage and everyday polish, not priced or judged as luxury.

Izod, under I in the Men's Fashion Brands directory: the mid-range dressy-casual and sportswear brand - Vincent Draddy's 1952 license that made Izod Lacoste, the early-1990s Crystal Brands separation, the license's end and Sportloisirs' Lacoste purchase in 1993, the sale to Phillips-Van Heusen in 1995, the PVH Heritage Brands home alongside Van Heusen, Arrow, Warner's, Olga and Speedo, and the crest-marked piqué polo.

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