Lacoste did not ban tennis whites. It did something ruder: it made them look frightened.
For Spring 2027, creative director Pelagia Kolotouros titled the show Dress code: No white required and sent 55 looks across a court the colour of fresh rust. The old country-club uniform was still present, but its authority had gone. Trench coats dragged. Shirts slipped. Performance layers collided with tailoring. “SPEED” graphics shouted across the body like industrial warnings, while tennis-ball yellow arrived so acidic it looked capable of dissolving the umpire’s chair.
This was not a polite remix of heritage. It was heritage after the match: sweaty, creased, over-accessorised and in no mood to pretend that white has ever been neutral.
White was never innocent
Tennis whites have always sold more than cleanliness. They sell access. They turn leisure into a class credential and perspiration into something that should happen discreetly, preferably behind a hedge. White says the body may compete as long as it never appears to struggle.
Kolotouros started somewhere else: tobacco, clay, soot, forest green. The opening trench and suit looked as if the court itself had dressed for a board meeting. A later charcoal jumpsuit billowed open at the waist, part flight suit, part groundskeeper, part woman who has already cancelled your membership. These clothes did not reject polish. They made polish answer to labour.
Clay-brown tailoring and a charcoal suit built for movement: the collection opened by putting elegance to work. Photos: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
Speed got loud
The collection’s sharpest interruption was a family of graphics built around the word “SPEED,” a ball-like target and the number 217 km/h. On a dress, the image collapsed into fringing and torn layers. On an enormous windbreaker, it sat over khaki shorts and a flash of neon like a warning label for a human body moving faster than etiquette can process.
Luxury sportswear often removes every trace of sport until only the price remains. Lacoste kept the friction. Drawcords hung loose. Nylon gathered. Shoes looked ready to grip the clay. The clothes understood that athletic glamour is not the fantasy of never sweating; it is the power of looking expensive while the sweat is still happening.
The polo escaped its job description
A heritage brand can become so reverent toward its icons that the archive starts behaving like a security guard. Kolotouros treated the Lacoste vocabulary as equipment instead. The polo became a rust-coloured running set. A green court dress disappeared beneath a coat large enough to qualify as weather. Acid tailoring arrived with a loose tie, technical layers and shoes that refused the fiction that a suit must stand still.
The round green bag was the collection in miniature: recognisable, ridiculous, precise. Tennis gave it the geometry; fashion gave it the nerve. Elsewhere, long necklaces swung like lanyards and protective hardware, and sunglasses sat low and hard across the face. The styling did not ask sport to become glamorous. It exposed the glamour already inside ritual, repetition and competitive obsession.
The polo, the court dress and the suit were all made to move—and then made strange. Photos: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
Then white came back dirty
The show’s title was not an anti-white manifesto. That would have been too simple, and Lacoste is too entangled with the colour to pretend otherwise. White returned late, but it no longer looked untouchable. A long coat framed a stack of graphic sport layers in khaki and fluorescent yellow. Then came white trousers visibly smeared with clay beneath a translucent top and clean coat.
That stain was the entire argument. Purity is boring; evidence is beautiful. The mark proved that the wearer had entered the game, crossed the surface and survived contact. White stopped functioning as a social barrier and became a record of experience.
White lost its monopoly: court layers crashed into acid tennis-ball scales and refused to clean themselves up. Photos: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
The club is open. The dress code is dead.
The smartest thing about Spring 2027 was that it never confused rebellion with disguise. This still looked unmistakably Lacoste: polos, pleats, sports bags, racket-club green, tennis-ball yellow, the permanent psychological hum of competition. Kolotouros did not escape the crocodile. She made it bite the hand that keeps ironing the uniform.
There were moments when the runway’s scale threatened to swallow the clothes, and some of the blown-up coats leaned harder on styling than cut. But even the excess served the point. Lacoste has spent decades selling the fantasy that composure is effortless. Here, effort finally became visible—and visibility made the clothes hotter.
No white required. No spotless pedigree. No performance of belonging. Just speed, stain and a very expensive refusal to behave. The best thing about Lacoste’s new dress code is not that it breaks the old one. It makes the old one look embarrassed.
