26/11/2024
🐊 CROCODILES ROCK! 🐊
👖 France 3 TV reports that my friend Guillaume Sagot - founder of Ateliers de Nîmes and who singlehandedly achieved his dream to "ramener denim à la maison" ( = bring denim home) - just received a letter from Lacoste's lawyers, demanding he stop using the crocodile on his logo, as the crocodile "belongs" to them.
🐊 However while their crocodile connection goes back to the 1930s with the promise of a crocodile-skin travel bag if Rene Lacoste won a tennis match, Guillaume's goes back way further than that - to Roman times, to be exact!
🐊 🌴 The crocodile chained to the palm tree is Nîmes' coat-of-arms - first used in 1536 and still in use today, it dates back to a coin minted in 28 BC to celebrate the Roman victory at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, where Augustus (né Octavian) beat the Egyptians, led by Cleopatra and Mark Anthony.
🐊 Minted in Nîmes, the chained crocodile symbolised Egypt's defeat, while the palm was the Roman symbol of victory - more importantly though, the coin was stamped "Col Nem", showing the importance of Nîmes at that time.
🐊 Thus the crocodile has been "ours" for a while now, and Guillaume's logo shows the crocodile and the palm tree coat-of-arms - so hardly an imitation of Lacoste's logo!
👖Last but not least, in a wonderful play on words, "Ateliers de Nîmes" ( = Nîmes Studios) is ADN for short - and ADN is French for DNA - thus denim is in Nîmes' DNA! 👖
