Lacoste
On a lark and a bet, René Lacoste single-handedly reinvented the game of tennis while serving up the first real apparel logo
By James Scully
Winter 2004 Style & Design
Long before the now ubiquitous crocodile crawled onto everything from
polo shirts and golf clubs to Sean Combs' tracksuit, René Lacoste was
reinventing the rules of the game—tennis, that is. Born in 1904,
Lacoste was a world-class tennis star by age 20. But winning wasn't his
only goal. He went on to revolutionize the game by inventing a ball
machine in 1930, the anti-vibration string damper in 1960 and the steel
tennis racquet in 1963. Yet none of these accomplishments were what
brought him worldwide fame. It was during a 1925 Davis Cup interzone
final—when Lacoste bet his team captain that if he won his match, the
captain would have to buy him a crocodile suitcase—that Lacoste's most
famous invention was born. He lost the match, but a journalist wrote,
"The young Lacoste has not won his crocodile-skin suitcase, but he
fought like a real crocodile." The nickname stuck. Lacoste went on to
create the perfect shirt for the game in white cotton piqué. It soon
replaced the traditional starched, long-sleeved tennis shirt. But the
real innovation was the small, green crocodile on the left breast (the
first time a logo was used on the outside of a shirt). Within a few
decades, Lacoste the brand bounced from center court to universal status
with nearly 800 stores as well as products ranging from footwear to
perfumes to sunglasses. Lacoste worked until his death at 92, but his
final project, to reinvent the tennis ball, went unrealized.
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His life and death recalled in images
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