Polo shirt design

During the 20th Century, tennis players wore “tennis whites” which consisted of long-sleeve button up shirts, usually worn with the sleeves rolled up. The attire was not suitable for tennis playing or comfort.

Seven-time French Grand Slam tennis champion René Lacoste,designed a white, short-sleeved, loosely-knit piqué cotton which he wore at the 1926 U.S. Open championship and called the cotton weave jersey petit piqué.

The American press gave Lacoste the nick name “The Crocodile”.
1927, Lacoste, placed a crocodile emblem on the left breast of his shirts
In 1933,Lacoste and André Gillier, a clothing merchandiser, and started marketing the shirts in Europe and North America and formed the company Chemise Lacoste. Each shirt included a small embroidered crocodile logo on the left breast. In 1920, Lewis Lacey, a haberdasher and polo player, began making a shirt that was embroidered with an emblem of a polo player

In the 1940s Hurlingham Polo Club began adopting the shirt style same

In 1972, Ralph Lauren noiced the growing popularity and released his “polo shirt” adopting the style of clothiers like Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and “Savile Row”-style, Lauren’s shirt were not specifically designed for use by polo players but imitated what by that time had become the normal attire for polo players.

Lauren logo was a depicted a “polo player and pony” following the success of the popular Lacoste’s crocodile emblem,

The modern day Polo shirts became popular in semi casual outdoors attire for a warm climate. And it wasn’t soon before the Polo shirt was adopted nearly universally as standard golf attire. Golf shirts often have a pocket on the left side, to hold a score pad and pencil.

Todays Polo shirts are commonly made out of polyester, cotton-polyester blends, or mercerized cotton. The placket typically holds three or four buttons, and consequently extends lower than the typical polo neckline. The collar is typically fabricated using a stitched double-layer of the same fabric used to make the shirt, in contrast to a polo shirt collar, which is usually one-ply ribbed knit cotton.