Lacoste - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

Lacoste sells clothing, footwear, leather goods, eyewear, watches and fragrance in more than 100 countries, still led by the polo shirt that began as Rene Lacoste's own on-court design. The brand passed fully to Maus Freres in 2012 and remains private. The fuller record - colour shirts from 1951, the American Izod years, and the brand-control recovery from 2000, together with two company documents from 2011 - is kept on the history page.

The word revolutionary is the filing's own, and the details earn it. A tennis shirt designed by a player, produced by a knitwear firm, and signed with an embroidered animal on the chest turned sportswear into branding: the logo sat outside the garment, visible across a court, rather than on a label inside a collar. In addition to tennis shirts, Lacoste produced shirts for golf and sailing - the same short-sleeved knit logic carried into neighbouring sports whose players shared the tennis customer's world. The historical record page's photograph note describes the classic short sleeve pique polo sold at Bloomingdale's in April 2011: soft, strong, fine cotton, a vented hem, pearlised buttons, and a small amount of resin finish enhancing colour fastness, minimising shrinkage and resisting abrasion.