Polo Shirt - History - Application To Polo and Other Sports

Application To Polo and Other Sports

Before Lacoste’s 1933 mass-marketing of his tennis shirt, polo players wore thick long-sleeve shirts made of Oxford-cloth cotton. This shirt was the first to have a buttoned-down collar, which polo players invented in the late 19th century to keep their collars from flapping in the wind (Brooks Brothers's early president, John Brooks, noticed this while at a polo match in England and began producing such a shirt in 1896). Brooks Brothers still produces this style of button-down "polo shirt". Still, like early tennis clothing, those clothes presented a discomfort on the field, and when polo players became aware of Lacoste’s invention in the 1930s they readily adopted it for use in polo.

In 1920, Lewis Lacey, a Canadian born of English parents in Montreal, Quebec in 1887, haberdasher and polo player, began producing a shirt that was embroidered with the logo of a polo player, a design originated at the Hurlingham Polo Club near Buenos Aires. The term polo shirt, which previously had referred only to the long-sleeved buttoned-down shirts traditionally used in polo, soon became a universal moniker for the tennis shirt; no later than the 1950s, it was in common usage in the U.S. to describe the shirt most commonly thought of as part of formal tennis attire. Indeed, tennis players often would refer to their shirt as a "polo shirt," notwithstanding the fact that their sport had used it before polo did.

In 1972, Ralph Lauren included his "polo shirt" as a prominent part of his original line called Polo, thereby probably helping to further its already widespread popularity. While not specifically geared for use by polo players, Lauren’s shirt imitated what by that time had become the normal attire for polo players. As he desired to exude a certain "WASPishness" in his clothes, initially adopting the style of clothiers like Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and "Savile Row"–style English clothing, he prominently included this attire from the "sport of kings" in his line, replete with a logo reminiscent of Lacoste’s crocodile emblem, depicting a polo player and pony. This worked well as a marketing tool, for subsequently, due to the immense popularity of Lauren’s clothing, a majority of English-speaking westerners began to refer to Lacoste’s tennis shirt as a "polo shirt". Still, "tennis shirt" remains a viable term for all uses of Lacoste’s basic design.