THE COLLECTION LIMITED EDITION

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2 THE COLLECTION LIMITED EDITION For Autumn 2017, Lacoste has given carte blanche to the duo of graphic artists Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, alias M/M paris. Felipe Oliveira Baptista, Lacoste s artistic director, had been dreaming of combining the iconic crocodile with the talent and the very special world of these two artists. I admire their work, which I find very personal and rich. I like the alchemy which takes place between their freedom of tone and the strictness of their creations, he explains. For three decades, M/M paris has embodied the best there is in the field of signs and visual identity. Among the most innovative designers of their generation, the pair have marked the era with their artistic creations based on thinking which is always profound and often political. What makes them original is that they never work in only one medium. Mathias and Michael thus switch according to their affinities from fashion to music, from contemporary art to theatre and from decorating to creating a perfume. For a long time they put their name to promoting Yohji Yamamoto and, with Nicolas Ghesquière, they created the renaissance vocabulary of Balenciaga. They work among other things today with Jonathan Anderson for Loewe and its JW Anderson brand. They are the official graphic artists of Björk, Benjamin Biolay, Etienne Daho and Jean-Louis Murat. They also work with the artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, institutions such as the Lorient theatre, the Dijon Consortium and Fiac, whose posters they have been designing since An eclectic clientele with whom they build up a long-term relationship in which a genuine complicity is established, each partner assisting the other in its development. We thus took the opportunity to ask the two how they came to envisage this invitation. The alphabet is undoubtedly the favourite area of expression of Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, who have had fun redefining the outline of the iconic crocodile from A to Z. Graphically redesigned according to the geometry of the letters composing the brand s name, the L stylises the crocodile s tail while the E represents its open mouth. The products in a capsule collection and a limited edition thus take on a new look for a time while these artists work with us. Produced in the 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, the famous French graphic studio has dreamt up a days of the week version of the unisex polo: 7 letters for LACOSTE and one outsize letter for each of the 7 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 sneakers decorated with the LACOSTE patch and fitted with a red sole, and a crocodile-shaped sports bag. This collection will be available from the 24th of October 2017 on lacoste.com and from the 15th of November 2017 in all LACOSTE stores worldwide.

3 How were you approached by Felipe Oliveira Baptista? He approached us like a crocodile, on all fours. I m joking! 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. One day we sent him 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 polo shirt photographed on a white background as a cult object. We were sure he would like this relationship with things. What do Lacoste and its logo, the crocodile, represent for you as artists? It was the first brand to use something which has nothing to do with the product as a symbol. The forefather of the Apple apple. A crocodile which suddenly becomes a polo shirt, it s awesome! 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 it animal meaning to become the representation of a brand. And for us, fascinated as we are by signs, symbols and images, it s a great success. An early emoji. What was your reaction to Lacoste s invitation? We told ourselves it would be good to get the crocodile to take the opposite path and bring it back into the world of signs. That is why we write the word Lacoste in the form of a crocodile with an alphabet which we had already designed. We used a simple and expressive typography which enables the image of what is written to be conveyed. If I write banana, for example, I can make people believe that it looks like a banana. The first letter L gets it to lift its tail. It s a stroke of luck. And the E, an open letter, looks like the crocodile s open mouth. It works well. We also put two red dots in the loops of the E. Our crocodile is thus stylised and black, white, green and red like the original one. 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 his game. That is where we escape and depart into poetry and plays on words, signs and symbols.

4 As consumers, at what age were tempted by the Lacoste polo? My cousins, whose father was a gendarme, wore Lacoste polos. Their parents earned more than mine. The polos they had grown out of thus got passed on to me. When I saw them arrive, I was fascinated. What colour were they? White. With the green crocodile. Later, when I was about 20, I tried the long-sleeved Lacoste polo. michaël I m trying to remember if I was tempted but I don t think I ever was. I think it was too French for me. Why were you interested in working for Lacoste? It was a matter of asking ourselves: is it possible to redesign the Lacoste logo? 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? michaël The initial brief was to design a polo shirt, our version of the Lacoste polo. 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. How did you choose the products? There are polos which are simply rebranded but there is also a lot of development work on standard products which we redesigned with Felipe. Such as the wide poncho with the whole alphabet, for example? Yes. Felipe often redesigns the company s classics. That s because he is smart. Rather than doing completely crazy things, he embellishes existing forms and makes them more contemporary, which is rather clever. We chose colours and shapes and tried to bring the products into line with our stylistic vision of the brand and the era. And the tennis bag which takes on the form of your crocodile Once we had started working together, we suggested going further and creating things which did not yet exist, like that bag. We also redesigned the fans windbreaker with the idea of creating a sandwich man. It s a way of mediatising our project, a big poncho promoting our alphabet.

5 A typography with cookie cutter type letters? Work on a word-image like a very simple typography exercise in the first year of graphic design school. These letters all have a very rudimentary shape, based on very rigid principles. There is a joyful and playful side in their assembly but their construction rule is very basic. That s our answer to Felipe s invitation but also our usual way of working on typography. Is typography the basis of your work? Yes, we have created a lot of alphabets, practically every time we have worked for a brand. 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. a voice. Brands need michaël We realised with practice that this was the simplest and most effective way to express a voice, however different the media concerned. When you work with Björk, Fiac or magazines, is this typographical element more present than ever? It 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 Björk, it was the first typography which 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. Will this new temporary Lacoste logo also be produced in 3D? These letters spell out the brand but can also map its territory. That is the basis of what we are demonstrating. Their simple system enables them to be enlarged to the scale of a room: a 100 m² white cube containing a huge stylised crocodile. Or on a smaller scale it would be a piece of furniture where you store your polo shirts. The possibilities are infinite. Expanded to twenty times the size, we could imagine a Lacoste building. 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!

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