Every year, the Lacoste Arena on the Champs-Élysées stops being a store and becomes something else entirely. A stadium. A clubhouse. A living tribute to the most storied partnership in tennis. For Roland-Garros 2026, Lacoste has converted its flagship from the pavement to the top floor, and the result is one of the most complete seasonal transformations in retail right now.
It starts from the street. The same burnt orange of the Roland-Garros clay, with LACOSTE lettering spread across the glass frontage. The windows carry white court-line graphics and mannequins dressed in the SS26 Roland-Garros collection, tennis balls scattered at their feet. Before you’ve stepped inside, the store has already told you what it is.
Inside, the clay court logic runs everywhere. Terracotta carpet covers the main floor, court markings continuing onto the walls. Ball hoppers full of tennis balls sit alongside every display. At the centre of the space, a circular Club Lacoste × Roland Garros medallion anchors the room, a striped tournament parasol shading a wooden table styled with bags and accessories from the range. Clothing racks on white plinths carry the full collection: performance polos, navy track jackets with terracotta chest stripe, pleated skirts, footwear. The SS26 range is everywhere, and in this environment it doesn’t feel like product. It feels like kit.
The staircase is the moment that stays with you. Fully clad in terracotta, lined on both sides with Roland-Garros campaign imagery, mannequins from the collection staged at every level. It reads like a clay-court runway running straight through the heart of the building. The footwear wall, warm walnut shelving stacked with multi-colourway shoes and actual Roland-Garros trophy props, carries the same energy: grit and glory, side by side.
This isn’t decoration. It’s a layered narrative that stretches from 1971, when René Lacoste’s brand first partnered with Roland-Garros, through to the athletes in those large-scale portraits looking out across the floor today. Lacoste has been the tournament’s exclusive apparel partner since 2019, meaning the kits worn by ballkids and officials on court are made by the same brand running this store during the same fortnight. The line between the tournament and the flagship is genuinely thin.
The clay court starts at the windows and doesn’t stop. That commitment to the logic of a concept, all the way from the facade to the back wall, is the thing that separates seasonal dressing from seasonal transformation. Most brands concentrate the effort at the front and let the concept thin out once you’re past the display zone. Here, the terracotta runs to the top of the building. The ball hoppers are on every floor. Nothing is left in its default state.
In a retail landscape fighting for relevance against the convenience of digital, this is the answer: a space so thoroughly itself that it becomes a pilgrimage. Not just for shoppers, but for anyone who wants to feel what it’s like to be inside a brand that has spent fifty-five years earning its place at the most iconic clay court tournament in the world. The Lacoste Arena during Roland-Garros doesn’t feel like a store running a campaign. It feels like the tournament has an outpost on the Champs-Élysées.
We’re very much here for it.
