When it comes to showcasing brands, will polo be the new runway?
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Sunday afternoon, watching men on horseback whack a ball back and forth across a field at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club, I thought I’d escaped the clutches of the fashion world for a few hours.
Until I realized that one of the teams on the field was sponsored by the Lucchese Boot Co., (the winning team, it turned out), and that the team’s white trousers were emblazoned with the name Michael Kors along the thigh. This came on the heels of a New York Times piece waxing on about Argentinean polo player Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Figueras, who pals around with the likes of Prince Harry and David Lauren (son of Ralph) when he’s not trying to popularize the sport of polo or posing for Ralph Lauren advertisements.
So is the high-society, low-popularity (at least in the U.S.) sport of kings, suddenly destined to become the NASCAR of the fashion industry, with the polo grounds replacing the runway as a way to reach the luxury clientele with money to spend? Maybe.
New in the polo sponsorship arena is Champagne brand Veuve Clicquot, part of the LVMH family (in fact, Sunday’s event was dubbed ‘The Veuve Clicquot Robert Skene Trophy Finals’), that includes a passel of fashion brands (including Louis Vuitton). As brands rethink the runway as a way to get their name in front of the right potential consumers, we’ll probably see alternatives -- like sponsoring or outfitting polo teams -- being explored more often.
But that’s not exactly how Lucchese and Kors came to the table. After the match we caught up with Lucchese team patron and player John Muse, of HM Capital Partners, who currently serves as chairman of the board for the El Paso-based company that has been hand-making boots in Texas since 1883.
Turns out Muse was turned on to polo during a stint in England trying to grow the business. And since Lucchese made polo boots up until the 1980s, Muse thought it would be a good fit. The company’s been making them again for a few years now. He brandished his own for me to examine.
They were a thing of beauty, soft and supple. ‘They are made differently from regular cowboy boots,’ Muse explained. ‘They need to be thicker and more substantial, with taller uppers and more layers.’ They’ll cost you too: Muse said an off-the-rack-pair can cost $900.
As for Kors? Muse said he’s been an investor in that label for a few years now too, and thought he’d experiment with the designer as a sub-sponsor (the pants are not the Michael Kors brand, by the way).
Lucchese is actually going to be the title sponsor for the next two weeks worth of matches in Santa Barbara, Muse informed us, with some 300 pairs of boots being shipped in from El Paso for polo players and regular folks to peruse.
It looks like luxury branding is jumping into new territory (booted) feet first.
-- Adam Tschorn
Follow the Image section on Twitter