Who invented the polo shirt?  Rene Lacoste claims he did – but … 

If you read most popular histories, including the Lacoste website, you’ll be told that it was thanks to French tennis champion Rene Lacoste that the jersey knit short sleeve shirt we call a polo was introduced to tennis. His design, based on a long sleeved shirt worn by polo players, was aired when the rule about button-down collars was withdrawn by the sport’s governing body in 1926.  When Lacoste retired from the sport in 1929, he decided to market his shirt with the famous emblem.    Hmm … 

Lovely story – the problem with it is, in 1887, line illustrations appeared in The News, a newspaper published in Maryland, showing men wearing what looks exactly like a short-sleeved polo shirt and described as: Just the thing for hot weather, new line polos.  

And in 1920, Lewis Lacey opens a sports store in Buenos Aires selling the new style polo shirts, once again illustrating the stock with a picture of a short-sleeved polo shirt being worn by a polo-player on a pony, and even more conclusively, showing the shirt actually bearing a logo of a polo player in the place where the Lacoste crocodile now sits.  You might think that’s a bit of overkill on the polo front, but it does seem to conclusively prove that Lacoste imported the idea (perhaps as a result of his touring internationally on the tennis circuit) rather than ‘inventing’ it.  Either way, the long-sleeved polo shirt has all but vanished from view while the short-sleeved version appears everywhere, and its mysterious history hardly matters compared to its current popularity. Lacoste photograph by KhayaL , used under a creative commons attribution

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