Lacoste’s “Locker Room” celebrates the beauty of being unfinished. There’s a kind of hush that lingers after a game ends. The applause fades, the racket rests, and the world exhales. Inside Lacoste’s imagined Locker Room for Spring-Summer 2026, that silence becomes something to study.
The show took place in the Hall Eiffel at Lycée Carnot, a glass-and-iron masterpiece that felt almost suspended in light. The space, reborn with tiled surfaces and steamed glass panels, transformed into something between a locker room and a dream, where privacy and spectacle blurred into one.
The mood was quiet but charged, like the pause between sweat and reflection. With this collection, Lacoste invited its audience to witness the most intimate moment of sport, not the match itself, but what happens just after.
Pelagia Kolotouros, the brand’s Creative Director, built the collection around this liminal instant, “when victory meets vulnerability.” It’s an unexpected focus for a label born on athletic discipline, yet it fits perfectly.
The Locker Room is imagined as more than a place: it’s a state of mind. Every athlete knows that ritual, the peeling off of layers, the breath that steadies before facing the mirror, the quiet recognition that triumph and exhaustion look almost the same. Kolotouros turns that scene into metaphor, exploring what it means to live in the in-between, to exist between effort and ease, between the version of oneself that performs and the one that simply is.
Fashion, after all, has always lived in that same tension, between showing and concealing, between polish and process.
Each piece in the collection reflects that balance. There’s an intentional sense of incompletion. Polos half unbuttoned, tracksuits slightly loosened, silhouettes that hover between comfort and allure. The result feels intimate without being fragile, sensual without trying too hard. Kolotouros takes the unguarded gestures of athletes and turns them into design language: the tug of a towel, the slip of fabric against skin, the pause before redressing for the world. In that softness, there’s strength.
Lacoste’s story began almost a century ago with René Lacoste himself, a tennis champion who reinvented what players wore and how they moved. The creation of the polo was an act of quiet rebellion against stiffness, a symbol of freedom disguised as sportswear. That spirit of innovation still runs through every seam of this new collection. This collection means to revisit the founder’s formative years not with nostalgia but with curiosity, translating his legacy of movement into modern grace. The glass panels and shower-curtain fabrics on the runway mirrored that dialogue between privacy and exposure, echoing the contradictions of our digital age, where everyone performs but also longs to retreat.
This season, Lacoste’s palette tells its own story. Archival blue and bright orange balanced with olive, taupe, and cream, like a memory of vintage tennis reimagined in the present tense. The crocodile logo appears embroidered with the grain of grass courts, a small tribute to the craftsmanship and heritage.
Even the Lenglen bag returns, its handle shaped like a racket grip, carrying that nostalgic touch of 1920s glamour into today’s world.
What makes The Locker Room compelling isn’t just its design, but its honesty. With this collection, Lacoste wants to remind us that performance isn’t the whole picture, it’s what follows that defines character. The show captures that emotional exhale after intensity, the way athletes stand still for a moment before re-entering the world. In that stillness, they find themselves again.
As the show closed, light broke through the glass ceiling and fog drifted across the runway. Models moved like echoes through steam, as if stepping out of a dream. Lacoste offered something more intimate than victory: the permission to rest, to be human, to embrace the pause.
The Locker Room isn’t about spectacle, it’s about return. It celebrates the grace of what happens when the game stops, when perfection relaxes its grip. To be unfinished is not to lack. It is to exist mid-transformation, with all the honesty that comes with it. In a culture obsessed with winning, Lacoste reminds us that true style begins after the match, in the quiet mirror light where we face ourselves again, unguarded, unhurried, and utterly alive.
Writer: La
