Ralph Lauren Mesh Polo Shirt

The shirt is short-sleeved and knitted in cotton mesh, Ralph Lauren's name for a piqué with an open, textured surface that breathes. It has a ribbed collar and a short buttoned placket. On the left breast, embroidered in a contrasting colour, a polo player leans from his pony with his mallet raised.

Ralph Lauren started his label in New York in 1967 with men's neckties, and a year later called his first full menswear line Polo, after a sport he admired. He wanted his clothes to carry the air of the old American establishment, and polo, the sport of kings, carried it. The polo player first appeared in 1971, on the cuffs of women's shirts, and in 1972 Lauren put it on the chest of a short-sleeved cotton knit shirt and sold it in twenty-four colours.

The form was not new. René Lacoste had been selling a short-sleeved knitted tennis shirt with an emblem on the chest since 1933, and Lauren's shirt was recognisably of that family. What Lauren changed was the name. He sold it as a polo shirt, a tennis shirt for the sport of kings, and the name took over the form: what had been a tennis shirt or a golf shirt became, in most of the world, a polo shirt. The emblem itself became famous enough to be parodied.

When the shirt took the form now sold is disputed. Ralph Lauren dates it to 1972, and Wikipedia's account of the polo shirt agrees, but the encyclopaedia's history of the company says the signature cotton mesh version came in 1977. The company still sells it as The Iconic Mesh Polo Shirt, in a classic fit and in slimmer ones, in a wide run of colours. A classic-fit white one with a navy pony is the shirt most people picture.