These logos are imprinted in our minds. This series examines where they came from and why they work.
Brand: Lacoste
Designer: Robert George
Year: 1926
While France erupts in protests over President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, at least one 90-year-old there’s still at work and raking it in: Lacoste.
In 2022, the brand, which is based in Paris, grew 26% to 2.5 billion euros.
Since it began in 1933, Lacoste has seen many fashion trends come and go and had plenty of changes among its design team, including naming Pelagia Kolotouros as creative design director in February. But one thing has remained constant: the brand’s iconic crocodile logo, which is older than the brand itself.
One-man brand: Paris-born René Lacoste was ranked the No. 1 tennis player in the world in 1926 and 1927; he won the French Open three times and both Wimbledon and the US Open twice.
Accounts vary on how he earned the nickname “Le Crocodile”: in one version, it was because a tennis team captain promised him a crocodile suitcase if he won a match; in another, it was because he played with the endurance of the creature; and in yet another, it was that his prominent nose was reminiscent of the reptile’s snout.
Around 1926, after an artist friend, Robert George, drew a crocodile for him, Lacoste had it embroidered on the pocket on the left side of the white blazer he wore to matches.
Lacoste also is credited with inventing the polo shirt as we know it. When he started playing professionally, players wore long-sleeved, button-down shirts, but he bucked the trend when, around 1927, he had short-sleeve shirts custom-made: They were inspired by short-sleeved oxford cloth shirts worn by polo players, but these were jersey-knit with only three buttons.
In 1933, he teamed up with André Gillier, a knitwear manufacturer, to form a new company, La Chemise Lacoste, to produce the tennis shirt he’d made famous. And the logo he’d had embroidered on his blazer seven years before became the logo for the brand.
Why it works: Brands, naturally, tend to insist on consistency and uniformity about how their logos appear.
“Often a logo is designed or a brand system of visual identity is put into use and then strict guidelines are written [that] you can’t do this and you can’t do that,” Mary Zalla, global president of consumer brands at Landor & Fitch, told us. “The most important elements and assets of a brand were the ones that we wanted to lock down and write these strict rules around.”
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But Zalla noted that Lacoste broke all of those rules from 2018 to 2020 when, for each of those years, the brand introduced limited-edition versions of polo shirts where, in a fundraising partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, it replaced the crocodile logo on some shirts with endangered species such as the Sumatran tiger and the kakapo.
“So that’s taking what you think of an iconic asset, which we would think we wouldn’t touch, and they’re actually liberating it in culture to tell a story,” Zalla said.
She told us she counted the Lacoste logo in a special class of “extraordinary assets” that can be liberated in that way.
“You don’t have to lock them down,” Zalla said. “In fact, those are exactly the assets you should be using to signal your purpose to tell a story.”
Later gator: The logo is “almost universally referred to as an alligator,” according to the the New York Times, but the brand is unequivocal: It’s a crocodile. In an online history by the brand, Lacoste uses the word “crocodile” 47 times, and “alligator” not even once.
Animal magnetism: The Lacoste logo is often credited with being the first logo ever to appear on the outside of an article of clothing (as opposed to the label), a claim made by the brand itself, although others have claimed Jantzen did so first with its logo of a diving woman.
What’s not disputed is that Lacoste was the first in a long line of brands to put an animal logo on clothing, long before Ralph Lauren’s polo pony, Tommy Bahama’s marlin, Vineyard Vines’s whale, or the eponymous logos of American Eagle and Puma.
As for why the Lacoste logo took hold, René Lacoste was himself at a loss to explain.
“I suppose you could say that if it had been a really nice animal, something sympathetic, then maybe nothing would have happened,” he said in 1973 in an Associated Press story quoted by the New York Times. “Suppose I had picked a rooster. Well, that’s French, but it doesn’t have the same impact.’’