Fred Perry and Lacoste are fashion businesses built around superficially similar shirts emerging from the elite Wimbledon tennis tournament. How did one come to exemplify working class cool, and the other upper-crust privilege? [The Awl}

  • Daneel

    Really? I thought they both exemplified chav. Just like every other branded polo shirt (Ralph Lauren, Hackett, Lambretta et al).

  • TheMudshark

    Two years ago I bought a Lacoste polo. It was definitely legit, from a Lacoste store. I thought what the hell, I like the design, I´ll want to wear it for a long time, I´m gonna invest in a quality shirt for once. One washing at 30° later it had shrunk in length to an extent that I couldn´t wear in anymore. Piece of garbage.

    What does that say about me? I got suckered once, not going to happen again.

  • http://gspirits.com/ Zod

    I don’t wear polo shirts…I only wear Hawaiian Aloha shirts…only! Never anything else!

    • Ipo

       A life of fridays! 

      • http://gspirits.com/ Zod

         I wish…fridays have the implication of the upcoming weekend..unfortunately I have to work for a living, so it’s 5 days on, 2 days off for me until the foreseeable future. Fortunately for me though, I work in an industry where a dress code is very lax, as is my intention! I would *NEVER* work for a company that required me to wear a suit and tie!

  • noah django

    As an american child of the 80s who grew up poor, the only thing tennis shirts/polos of any manufacture meant to me was preppy.  Even after reading the link, it still seems bizarre that a tennis shirt could be adopted by the working class, but there you have it.

  • Paul Renault

    In the linked-to article, the photo doesn’t have people wearing T-shirts.  

    Those are golf or polo shirts, no?

    • noah django

      you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the “T” in “T-shirt” stands for “tennis.”  A t-shirt is shaped like a T, that’s where the name comes from.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_shirt

      As the ˆwordsˆ in the linked-to article explain, the tennis shirt is now known as a “polo” due to the popularity of Ralph Lauren’s brand in the 80s.

      please accept these lovely parting gifts, and thanks for playing.

  • penguinchris

    I like Lacoste polo shirts because they fit me nicely (size 5 – it’s near-perfect). I don’t look unusual or anything, but I have slightly odd proportions and most clothing doesn’t fit me quite right (in other words, I have an excuse to be very, very picky about how clothes fit me). They’re perfect in the shoulders and nice and trim through the chest and waist (most clothes are really baggy and I like things to be very slim).

    @TheMudshark:disqus I like that they’re short – most shirts (of any type) are several inches too long on me which makes me look short (I need a couple extra inches in my legs to be better-proportioned). Once you start wearing fitted, tailored clothing, you do have to be careful about sizing and you have to anticipate shrinkage. And some things you may find you just can’t wear at all even if you’d like to be able to (at least without having alterations done).

    Notably, the three or four Lacoste polo shirts I have were all purchased at thrift stores for 99 cents each. No way I’d pay anywhere near full price for one! This also took the shrinkage problem out of the equation for me since they’d already been worn and washed when I tried them on :) They’re great quality – you do get what you pay for to some extent – and will last a long time.

    Fred Perry shirts have a different fit and very different styling. The article is interesting in providing the history – there’s a photo of an older Fred Perry shirt that is similar in styling to the Lacoste shirts, so they really were pretty much the same originally. But it’s sort of implying that they’re still pretty much the same shirt but with a different logo, and that’s simply not true.

    Once Fred Perry became a cool item for certain crowds, they started styling the shirts much more aggressively, while Lacoste never really changed the original styling (though they have expanded options now, they’re in the same vein). The Fred Perry shirts are styled like other things that mods, punks, skinheads, and just regular angry young men etc. might wear. Whether you fit in that crowd or not, that’s the association you will get wearing those shirts because the aesthetic is so strong (the strongest element in terms of Fred Perry shirts being the contrast piping, and the color choices).

    I sympathize strongly with the very British angry young man thing, but not the styling – the whole “chav” aesthetic which Fred Perry shirts are now associated with as well. But of course it does depend on the person and what else you wear – somehow I can see Rob, who said on Twitter he’s a Fred Perry person, looking fine in Fred Perry and not like a chav whereas I would look stupid wearing them.

    • TheMudshark

      The problem is not that they´re short, it´s that the shirt got significantly shorter after washing (I´m talking almost belly top here). When I wash a 2€ shirt from a Thai market it doesn´t shrink as much  as this 70€ one from Lacoste did. It´s simply unacceptable.

      • penguinchris

        Hehe… well you’ve come up with your own solution there, buy the counterfeit Lacoste polos available at every corner in the tourist markets in Thailand :)

        I have to admit that I was going through some of my clothes and tried on one of my Lacoste shirts, which I hadn’t worn in a while, because of this article. It was actually a lot shorter than I remember it being. I think my idea that my size in Lacoste shirts is their size 5 might be wrong because there’s no way I could tuck it in (like you would for tennis) though it’s long enough to reach the waist of my pants. I think for normally-proportioned people you have to size up and expect something of a baggy fit if you go for their classic style, unfortunately.