Lacoste Releases Lacoste x M/M (Paris) Collection

Being an album artwork enthusiast, I always make it a point to find out the creative and the art director as well as the designing firm behind it on the liner notes. 

To me, while the songs contained in an album itself are the key to its success, the packaging part plays an important role, too. Thus, the age-old adage, “Do not judge a book ― in my case, an album ― by its cover” perhaps is irrelevant for me. Through Madonna’s American Life album, M/M (Paris) caught my attention.

Inspired by revolution and libreation icon Che Guevara, it took just six minutes for Madonna and M/M (Paris) founders Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag to agree on the artwork concept. And American Life, in all of its glamorised military splendour, is only a part of the agency’s 30 years’ worth of creative works. 

This year, M/M (Paris) has been given a carte blanche by the iconic French label Lacoste, to design a special collection envisioned by the Creative Director, Felipe Oliveira Baptista – the merging of the iconic Lacoste crocodile with the duo’s special talents.

“I admire their work, which I find very personal and rich,” Baptista explains on this collaboration. “I like the alchemy which takes place between their freedom of tine and the strictness of their creations.”

“He approached us like a crocodile, on all fours!” Augustyniak, one half of the designing duo jokingly recalls. “We were following each other from afar. We saw him as an interesting designer for his own brand, and we also liked his Lacoste approach.”

The story of the partnership began when Augustyniak and Amzalag sent Baptista a reissue of a record by Marie et Les Garçons ― “a group we liked in the eighties” ― with a sleeve showing a pale blue Lacoste shirt, photographed on a white background as a cult object. And that was how the relationship between Baptista and Lacoste and M/M Paris bloomed. And what initially started as a polo shirt design brief somehow turned into a 360-degrees branding work.

“The initial brief was to design a polo shirt, our version of the Lacoste polo,” says Amzalag, “So the question we asked was ‘what do we change?’ We told ourselves that if we redid the logo, if we did a branding job, then we would have to use it on as many products as possible.”

“It was a matter of asking ourselves: is it possible to redesign the Lacoste logo?” Augustyniak echoes his partner’s statement. “[It’s] a crazy idea because Lacoste has one of the best logos in the world, and has done for 85 years. But because this was an artistic collaboration, we were able to create a utopian project. What if, just for one season, Lacoste was no longer a crocodile but letters which join together to form a crocodile?”

In fact, it is the Lacoste crocodile icon that gotten them excited. Reason being, Lacoste is the first brand to use a reptile that has no association with the product – a polo shirt – as a symbol. To them the crocodile too represents a great success, or as they would opine, an early emoji.

“A crocodile which suddenly becomes a polo shirt, it’s awesome!” Augustyniak enthused. “Just think, this crocodile doesn’t even say ‘Lacoste’ any more, it says ‘tennis top’. For us it is the ultimate symbol.

It’s the first animal which loses its animal meaning to become the representation of a brand.”

Branding aside, M/M Paris too were involved in product selection. Working hand in hand with Baptista, some of the polo shirts are rebranded and some standard products require a lot of development work. 

Both Augustyniak and Amalzag were tasked with determining the colours and shapes, trying to bring the products into line with their stylistic vision of Lacoste ad the era. On the other hand, Baptista redesigned the company classics with embellishments of existing forms and making them more contemporary.  The result is a graphical and fun capsule collection.

Doused in classic Lacoste colours of white, navy, red, sky blue or flamingo pink, each garment is embroidered with the word “LACOSTE” in green and red two-tone lettering. 

This embroidery replaces the crocodile on a short-sleeved polo and moves to the middle on a sweater, a headband or wristbands, while a unisex T-shirt carries the whole of the alphabet in which only the letters spelling out LACOSTE are coloured. 

These graphics are repeated on one side of the reversible Anna bag, the other side showing a print with a repetition of the successful pair’s logo, M/M (Paris).

For the limited edition line, M/M (Paris) has dreamt up a “days of the week” version of the unisex polo: Seven letters for Lacoste and one outsize letter for each of the seven polos always emblazoned with the embroidered word LACOSTE in place of the crocodile. 

A heather grey or plain black hoodie and a graphic poncho combining the alphabet print and the M/M (Paris) print complete this limited edition. The added accessories are a pair of white L.12.12 sneakers decorated with the LACOSTE patch and fitted with a red sole, and a crocodile-shaped sports bag.

To reinterpret the Lacoste logo, Augustyniak opined to take a different side of the crocodile and bring the icon back into the world of signs. Using simple and expressive typography, the word Lacoste is written in the form of a crocodile as a way to convey the image.

“Yes, we have created a lot of alphabets, practically every time we have worked for a brand,” says Augustyniak. “We’re the ones who suggest it, generally the brand doesn’t ask for it. For us, it is a tool which enables a language to be established.”

The approach resulted a unique reinterpretation of the brand name as well as the brand’s icon – the crocodile, nonetheless. Look closely and you will see that the letter L and you may notice that it is akin to a crocodile lifting its tail. On the other hand, the letter “E” looks like the crocodile’s open mouth.

“Our crocodile is thus stylised and black, white, green and red like the original one,” says Augustyniak. “This might not just be a matter of chance. The animal symbolises the tenacity of René Lacoste’s game, but perhaps his name already echoed in his game. That is where we escape and depart into poetry and plays on words, signs, and symbols.”  

Augustyniak adds, “[Typography] is the lowest common denominator of all our projects. We could use the alphabet as an entry point for each of them. A bit like our book. It’s always the starting point.”

“With [Icelandic artiste] Björk,” he continues, “It was the first typography that we associated with her voice, a wired typography, the allegretto, which subsequently inspired all the typographies we created for her. We could do an exhibition on Björk with no images but only graphics.”

Asked if there were possibilities for the reinterpreted Lacoste logo to be further utilised in 3D forms,  such as furniture, Augustyniak believes  the possibilities are infinite.

“Expanded to twenty times the size, we could imagine a Lacoste building,” he says. “Having a free hand in this way made it a real game, an intellectual stimulation and a work of reflection on the brand enabling us to underline the validity and inventiveness of its logo. We made a fake of the crocodile, but a legal fake. It was quite funny!”

Lacoste x M/M (Paris) collection is available now at Lacoste online store (http://www.lacoste.com/) and in all Lacoste stores around the world.

*Photos courtesy of Lacoste

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