Our love affair with Embroidered Polo Shirts seems to continue unabated but when things started back in the late 1920’s they weren’t so popular, nor were they called Polo Shirts.

What we now know as the Polo Shirt was originally developed by French tennis ace Rene Lacoste, who designed it as a more comfortable and less restrictive alternative to the formal tennis shirts of the day. He first wore the shirt at the 1926 U.S. Open championship and in 1927 added an embroidered Crocodile logo to the left chest, reflecting the fact that by then he had become known as ‘The Crocodile’ by the American press.

Follow up:

In 1933 he formed the Lacoste Shirt company, to market his tennis shirt, perhaps little knowing the extent to which his creation would become popular. His shirt design was soon to be adopted as the preferred garment for Polo players and then, in the early 1970’s, an emerging fashion designer called Ralph Lauren decided to make it an integral part of his menswear range, with an embroidered design of a Polo player on the left chest.

Suddenly the sports oriented Polo Shirt crossed into mainstream fashion and the rest (as they say) is history. Embroidered Polo Shirts are now a mainstay of the modern wardrobe, worn by people of all ages, all over the world and used variously as a casual garment, a fashion statement or an item of staff uniform.

©First Impressions (Europe) Ltd 2011

Image courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-07746 / CC-BY-SA

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