It is hard to think of any item of sportswear as ubiquitous as the short-sleeve cotton piqué shirt with a placket and a small collar. Today, it slips, chameleon-like, between sporting disciplines with fluid ease. In the buggy and on the green, it is known as the golf shirt. Among the mallet-wielding, centaur-like sportsmen of Argentina—as well as those who shop at Ralph Lauren—it is known as the polo. And during what the British ironically refer to as "flaming June," when first the Queen's Club and then Wimbledon's Centre Court become the focus of the nation's attention, it is known as the tennis shirt.Get more news about cheap womens lacoste polo shirts,you can vist kictg.com!

But whatever you call it, the shirt is a universally accepted form of dress, worn by world leaders when they want to strike a note of—often awkward—informality. The corporate world too has embraced it: Along with the company-branded rucksack, the logo polo is a core component of the delegate welcome pack at most two-day seminars or annual business retreats. It is also one of the chief pillars in the summer wardrobe of "dad wear"—an inoffensive garment spotted at countless garden barbecues, where it is accessorized with a bottle of lager welded into the fist. Such is its ubiquity that, come Wimbledon, it is almost a surprise to be reminded that it was once a genuine item of sporting apparel.

And yet, mirabile dictu, there was a time when exercise and the clothing that accompanied it were considered shockingly modern. "Exercise!" explodes Algernon, the wealthy, idle bachelor in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. "Good God! No gentleman ever takes exercise." Wilde wrote that play in 1895, and yet by 1913 exercise—tennis, in particular—was center stage with Jeux, a ballet about a game of tennis, premiering in Paris, written for the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Costumes were by Diaghilev's longtime collaborator Léon Bakst. In the fall of 2010, London's Victoria and Albert Museum mounted an exhibition about the Ballets Russes. In the catalog essay, art historian John Bowlt wrote that "the monochrome, functional sportswear for the Tennis Players in Jeux was not so very far from the Constructivist prozodezhda (work clothing) of Liubov Popova and her close colleague, the avant-garde designer Varvara Stepanova."
It seems that Diaghilev was determined to keep constructivist-style sportswear in the cultural vanguard. It was a major feature of Le Train Bleu, the famous one-act whimsical ballet (or danced operetta, as it was called at the time) developed with Jean Cocteau and named after the luxurious express train to the Côte d'Azur. It was a significant cultural moment, not least because its dancers wore sportswear-inspired costumes designed by Coco Chanel that reflected the prevailing mania for pursuing vigorous pastimes such as tennis, golf and swimming.