A signature line returns, broader in scope
On 27 April 2026 Lacoste presents a global brand campaign that brings back the line "Life is a Beautiful Sport", first introduced in 2014. The platform is developed with long-standing creative partner BETC Paris and shifts the slogan from a tennis shorthand to a wider lifestyle proposition that fuses sport, fashion and everyday movement. The Maison frames the return as a re-anchoring of its tonality in a year of intensive brand activity, set against the backdrop of Roland-Garros and the broader French summer.
The phrase first appeared in the early 2010s as Lacoste sought to translate its tennis heritage into a wider ambition for elegance in motion. Over the following decade the line was adapted for a range of films, products and partnerships, before quietly receding in favour of more product-driven communication. Its return in 2026 is positioned as an editorial decision rather than a nostalgic gesture, with the language unchanged but the visual register updated to match the Maison's recent identity refresh.
A film that begins in the city and ends on the clay
The centrepiece of the platform is a cinematic film in which a young woman moves at speed through Paris. The camera tracks her along quays, through parks and across Haussmannian boulevards, weaving between traffic and pedestrians. The choreography references tennis footwork without literalising it, holding the suggestion that sport is a posture of attention rather than a discipline reserved for the court. The film closes at Roland-Garros, where brand ambassador Novak Djokovic is waiting, and the encounter resolves the chase as a meeting between two registers of the same idea.
BETC Paris keeps the cinematography close to the codes Lacoste established with the agency over more than a decade of collaboration: warm light, restrained sound design and a colour palette built around the historic green, off-white and clay reds that define the Maison's archive. The polo, the dress and the simple accessories on screen are drawn from the current Roland-Garros collections, allowing the campaign to operate as both brand statement and seasonal storefront without tipping into product cataloguing.
A coordinated three-part repositioning
The campaign sits at the head of a coordinated 2026 repositioning that touches identity, product and communication. In April 2026 Lacoste introduced a refined visual identity developed with London studio Commission Studio, restoring the historic green, refining the Crocodile and adding clay and farine to the palette. In March 2026 Creative Director Pelagia Kolotouros presented her first runway collection for the Maison at Roland-Garros, framed under a "tech-heritage" approach. The April communications platform now layers a tonal proposition over those structural moves, placing all three streams under the same editorial direction within a single calendar quarter.
For Lacoste the sequence corresponds to a familiar rhythm in fashion and consumer goods, in which a new design lead is followed by an identity refresh and then by a campaign that codifies the resulting world. The novelty is the compression of these stages into a few weeks and the explicit retrieval of an existing slogan rather than the introduction of a new one, signalling continuity in tone alongside change in form.
Source: Lacoste Youtube
Roll-out and media plan
The platform rolls out across film, print, digital and social, with extended presence at the 2026 French Open in late May and early June. Cut-downs of the central film populate connected television and online video, while still photography from the same shoot anchors out-of-home and editorial print partnerships in Paris, London, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai. In retail, the new visual identity introduced in April 2026 carries the campaign typography through windows, in-store screens and mailings.
The decision to time the platform with Roland-Garros consolidates a partnership that runs back to 1971, when Lacoste first dressed the tournament's ball-persons. With Djokovic, Lacoste retains a sport ambassador whose own narrative of discipline and longevity sits comfortably within the Maison's history. The campaign therefore reads as a careful recalibration rather than a reinvention, returning to a phrase the brand had authored, surrounding it with new design tools and pointing it outward toward a global audience that no longer reads the Crocodile as a tennis sign alone.
What the line carries now
"Life is a Beautiful Sport" is unusual among slogans in that it predates the strategic framework it now sits inside. In 2014 the line announced an aspiration. In 2026, with a new creative director, a refined identity and a renewed retail posture, it functions as a summary of work already underway. That distance between the line and its present role is what gives the new film its measured tone, and it is what allows the Maison to treat the revival as an editorial gesture rather than a relaunch.
