Style Edit: French sportswear brand Lacoste and its creative director Pelagia Kolotouros host actors Adrien Brody and Claire Danes, and tennis player Venus Williams, at their Paris Fashion Week runway
The brand’s autumn/winter 2025 collection bears its famous crocodile logo, originally inspired by the nickname of its founder, French tennis legend, René Lacoste
Lacoste is one of the few sportswear brands that has its origins in France, a country more associated with haute couture than performance wear.
Established in 1933 by pioneering tennis player René Lacoste, back when athlete-founded brands were certainly not a thing, the label is known to the world by its instantly recognisable crocodile logo, which originated from a nickname given to René by American media.
The most recent – to show Lacoste’s autumn/winter 2025 collection – was held on March 9 and was attended by the likes of two-time Oscar winner Adrien Brody, actress Claire Danes and tennis player Venus Williams, who all sat front row to take in the third collection designed by creative director Pelagia Kolotouros.
Raised in New York, Kolotouros, who previously worked at brands such as Adidas, The North Face and Calvin Klein, knows a thing or two about streetwear and sportswear.
The day before the autumn/winter 2025 show, she took some time from fittings and run-throughs to sit down for a chat.
What’s the first thing you did when you joined Lacoste two years ago?
There’s a factory outside Paris and it’s the first factory that [Lacoste] built in 1933. It still stands today, but over 90 years, it’s grown a lot. So it’s always great to go back to the source, to the origin, and that kind of informs how you want to shape something, and really reveals the DNA. So it was really important to go and walk around the factory, and meet the people who have been there for 20, 30 years, talk to them, to get the essence of the brand.