In 1925, when Rene Lacoste won both the French Championships and Wimbledon, he wore a starched white shirt with buttons extending all the way down the front and sleeves reaching to the wrists. In 1926, he won the United States National Championship wearing the same shirt but with its sleeves cut short: a daring evolutionary step toward an archetype of sportswear. In 1933, Lacoste went into business with a knitwear manufacturer to mass-produce la chemise Lacoste, a short-sleeved pullover with a turndown collar, three buttons on its placket and a breathable pique-cotton body. Ads extolled its suitability not just for le tennis and le golf but also for la plage (the beach): not just for athletic exertion but for general leisure. The shirt was not rigid, but there was a rectitude to it. It promoted physical comfort while adhering to social strictures.
Lacoste once told People magazine that he derived inspiration from seeing one of his fancy friends, the fifth Marquess of Cholmondeley, take the court in the shirt he wore to play polo: ''A practical idea, I thought to myself.'' It is true that the polo shirt as we know it originated on the polo field, but it is also true, and telling, that the game's name has attached itself to many other garments. If you check inside the collar of a Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth button-down, you will see it declared ''the original polo shirt.'' When you flip through 1940s newspapers, you will find boys' knit-cotton crew necks promoted as ''polo shirts.'' What an American calls a turtleneck sweater, a Briton calls a polo-neck jumper. A camel's-hair coat was, in the 1920s, a polo coat. The brand name Polo Ralph Lauren first materialized on a label, paying quiet tribute to customers' Gatsby streaks, in 1967; Lauren did not hitch his pony and rider to a polo shirt until 1972.
Ralph Lauren, born in 1939 as Ralph Lifshitz, has frequently been compelled to defend his trademark against the United States Polo Association, founded in 1890 as a sports organization. Entering the rag trade with its U.S. Polo Assn. line in 1981, the group aroused the ardent curiosity of Lauren's legal team. Lawyers have met with limited success in arguing that polo (the institution) endeavors to ride the shirttails of Polo (the upstart) by selling shirts emblazoned with twice as many horses (and at half the price).
Meanwhile, Lacoste remains the brand emblematic of branding itself. Descended from the player's personal insignia, the famous crocodile is sometimes claimed as the first commercial logo designed for display.
When the American company Izod brought the Lacoste shirt to the United States in the 1950s, offered in colors livelier than Wimbledon white, it assumed its destiny among preppies. To complete a costume radiating vernal energy, a fellow would pick one up at Brooks Brothers or at the Andover Shop, which once composed a bit of ad-copy doggerel rhyming ''crocodile'' with ''signs of style.'' The polo must have peaked as a signifier of prep insidership in the 1970s. By 1982, the casual version of the Ivy League look had emerged as mass style. Izod moved $400 million worth of shirts that year.
It was a marketplace where anyone could go to the mall for a polo decorated with the frisking fox of J.C. Penney and where some connoisseurs of tennis-club style, sophisticated unto a slight loucheness, could repair to the pro shop for one sporting the logo of Boast, a Japanese maple leaf easily confused with a homage to marijuana. Hints of the old meaning still linger in the shirt's basic form, but to get across the point that you would rather be sailing, it helps to choose a shirt with a brazenly Biff-ish emblem - the whale of Vineyard Vines, say - or else select one in a color like flamingo pink, which tells a Palm Beach story.
The turndown collar is essential to the polo's presentability. If you doubt the importance of a collar to establishing the overall effect of an outfit, you would be well advised to talk with your tailor. Or your priest. This flap of fabric, so often superfluous to function, frames the face and caps the body, proving essential to tone. The logo sits at the symbolic heart, like a civilian rank insignia or an unwilting boutonniere. The chest presents a perch for charging tigers, waddling penguins, leaping marlins - any of a hundred thousand symbols.
Ralph Lauren's ''big pony'' shirts inflate his embroidered icon to a size that overwhelms a pectoral. In Mexico, counterfeit versions have been popular among high-level drug traffickers and, in turn, lower-class teenagers.
Four years ago, The Associated Press quoted a psychologist who hypothesized that the kids on the street were thumbing their noses either at the police or at everyone. Which brings us to those polo shirts bearing no emblem at all, an absence that may indicate the wearer's simple aversion to clutter or, alternatively, her pointed refusal to be branded. Some refuseniks will recall that Banana Republic once relished pitching its ''un-alligator travel shirt'' to people of their persuasion.
© 2015 The New York Times News Service
