Author Description

"When it came time to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Lacoste, Visionaire had an idea: use the polo shirt as an artist's canvas to create the first-ever wearable publication. Realized in full-color, full-coverage photographic printing, the polo shirts in issue 54 featured eye-popping artworks by Nick Knight, David Byrne, and Thomas Ruff, just to name a few. And it almost went off without a hitch -- almost. No one imagined that Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin's image of a nude woman screaming would elicit the ire of Lacoste's conservative factory workers. They demanded from the company's CEO a letter authorizing the construction of the raciest polo shirt known to man. The note was happily provided, and shortly after, 'Sport' came to be. For a polo shirt that reinterpreted vintage posters of Pedro Almodóvar movies, art director Juan Gatti took inspiration from the street. "Pedro loves shooting on the street, especially around cinema walls where there are many posters--torn and pasted over. Thus arose the idea. I tore actual posters and then we took a picture for the polo shirt." For artist Richard Phillips, 'Sport' captured his process from start to finish. "At the time of the project," he recalls, "I had just created a drawing and painting of Coco for my first exhibition at Gagosian in New York. It was inspired by a runway beauty shot. On the back of the shirt we reproduced the preparatory drawing of Coco, and on the front we printed the image of the completed painting. The shirt became a physical representation of the complete creative process"--Publisher's description.