After more than two years out of the game, the Swiss-owned French heritage tennis label Lacoste—the one with the crocodile, of course—bounced back into Paris this afternoon with a show served up at Stade Roland Garros.
Leading Lacoste’s return is Pelagia Kolotouros, a career pro on the fashion circuit: past tours include stints working on Beyoncé’s Ivy Park, Yeezy, and with Pharrell (all Adidas joints) as well as at The North Face. Speaking before this collection showed on the hallowed clay of Court Philippe Chatrier—Paris’s equivalent of Wimbledon’s Centre Court—the Parsons-trained New Yorker talked a good game. “We want to own tennis,” she said.
But never mind le tennis, what about la mode? On a rammed Paris Fashion Week finale day that included Chanel, Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent (menswear), the returning Lacoste was always going to be a wild card. It turns out that Lacoste’s latest incarnation held an activation party in New York last September, in order to seed Kolotouros’s take on founder René Lacoste’s 1927 New York victory in the Davis Cup as part of a generational French team that was popularly named The Four Musketeers. Upon their return to Paris, Roland Garros was constructed in order to provide a venue for the Cup’s defense, so holding today’s Lacoste show here—as Kolotouros’s predecessor Louise Trotter once also did—made heritage-brand sense.
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