History of Polo Shirts

A polo shirt, also known as a club and tennis shirt, is a kind of shirt with a collar, a placket with normally two or three buttons, and an optional pocket. Polo shirts are short sleeved.

All three phrases could be used interchangeably. Polo shirts are usually made of knitted cotton (rather than woven fabric ), usually a piqué knit, or less commonly a interlock knit (the latter utilized often, though not completely, using Pima cotton polos), or with other fibers like silk, merino wool, synthetic fibers, or blends of natural and synthetic fibers. A dress-length version of the shirt is called a polo dress.

History of the tennis shirt

From the 19th and early 20th centuries, tennis players ordinarily wore"tennis whites" consisting of long-sleeved white button-up shirts (worn with the sleeves rolled up), flannel trousers, and ties. This apparel presented difficulties for ease of play and relaxation.


René Lacoste, the French seven-time Grand Slam tennis champion, believed that the rigid tennis apparel was too cumbersome and uncomfortable. He designed a white, short-sleeved, loosely-knit piqué cotton (he predicted the cotton weave jersey petit piqué) shirt with an unstarched, flat, protruding collar, a buttoned placket, and a shirt-tail longer in back than in front (known today as a"tennis tail"; see below), he first wore at the 1926 U.S. Open championship.

Starting in 1927, Lacoste put a crocodile emblem on the left breast of his shirts, since the American press had begun to refer to him as"The Crocodile", a nickname which he embraced.

Back in 1933, after retiring from professional tennis, Lacoste teamed up with André Gillier, a buddy who was a clothes merchandiser, to market that shirt at Europe and North America. Together, they formed the firm Chemise Lacoste and started selling their tops, which included the Tiny embroidered crocodile emblem on the left breast.

Application to polo

Before Lacoste's 1933 mass-marketing of the tennis shirt, polo players wore thick long-sleeve shirts made from Oxford-cloth cotton. This top was the first to really have a buttoned-down collar, which polo players devised in the late 19th century to keep their collars from flapping in the wind (Brooks Brothers' early president, John Brooks, observed that while at a polo match in England and began producing such a shirt in 1896).



Brooks Brothers still produce this style of button-down"polo shirt". Still, like early tennis clothes, these clothes presented a discomfort on the area, and when polo players became more aware of Lacoste's innovation in the 1930s they readily adopted it to be used in polo.

In 1920, Lewis Lacey, a Canadian born of English parents in Montreal, Quebec, in 1887, haberdasher and polo player, started producing a shirt that has been embroidered with an emblem of a polo player, a layout originated at the Hurlingham Polo Club near Buenos Aires.

The term polo shirt, which previously had known only to the long-sleeved, buttoned-down shirts traditionally used in polo, soon became a worldwide moniker for its tennis shirt; from the 1950s, it was in common use in the U.S. to describe the top most commonly thought of as part of formal tennis apparel. Indeed, tennis players frequently would consult with their top for a polo shirt, notwithstanding the fact that their game had used it until polo did.

In 1972, Ralph Lauren added his"polo shirt" as a prominent part of his first line Polo, thus helping further its widespread recognition. While not specifically intended for usage by polo players, Lauren's shirt imitated what by that time had become the standard attire for polo players. As he desired to exude a particular"WASPishness" in his own clothing, originally embracing the design of clothiers such as Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and"Savile Row"-style English clothes, he prominently included this apparel from the"sport of kings" in his line, replete with a symbol reminiscent of Lacoste's crocodile emblem, depicting a polo player and pony.

This worked well as a marketing tool for, subsequently, the immense popularity of Lauren's garments led a majority of English-speaking westerners to begin referring to Lacoste's tennis shirt as a"polo shirt". However, "tennis top" remains a viable term for all applications of Lacoste's basic design.

Golf

On the latter half of the 20th century, even as conventional clothing in golf became casual, the tennis shirt was embraced nearly universally as conventional golf attire. Many golf courses and country clubs require players to wear golf shirts as a part of the dress code. Moreover, producing Lacoste's"tennis shirt" in various golf cuts has caused specific designs of the tennis shirt for golf, resulting in the moniker golf shirt.


Golf shirts are generally made from polyester, cotton-polyester blends, or mercerized cotton. The placket typically holds four or three buttons and consequently goes lower than the normal polo neckline. The collar is typically fabricated using a woven double-layer of the identical fabric used to produce the shirt, compared to a polo shirt collar, which is normally one-ply ribbed knit cotton. Golf tops frequently have a pocket on the left side, to hold a scorepad and pen, and may not bear a symbol there.

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