Club Lacoste Takes Over Selfridges: Inside The Fount Bar’s Tennis-Inspired Summer Residency

recall

• London’s Tennis Season Sets the Scene
• Club Lacoste’s Global Pop-Up Tour Lands in London
• Inside The Fount Bar’s Transformation
• René Lacoste: From Wimbledon Finalist to “Le Crocodile”
• The Cocktail Menu: Croc Classic and Match Martini
• The Tennis Heritage Collection on the Menswear Floor
• Where Sneaker Culture Meets Court Culture
• Visitor Information: Hours, Location and How to Experience It
• Fin

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Every summer, London turns its attention to grass courts, strawberries and cream, and a particular shade of green. With Wimbledon’s 2026 qualifying rounds beginning 22 June and the main Championships running from 29 June through 12 July, the city is once again at the centre of the tennis world. It’s against this backdrop that Lacoste has chosen to plant its flag in one of the capital’s most recognisable retail addresses: Selfridges on Oxford Street.

For a brand whose entire identity was forged on a tennis court nearly a century ago, the timing is anything but coincidental. Club Lacoste, the brand’s travelling tennis clubhouse concept, has touched down at Selfridges from 22nd June to 12th July, transforming The Fount Bar into a space that blends sporting heritage, contemporary hospitality and a healthy dose of French style. It’s a residency built for a city mid-tournament, and it gives shoppers, tennis fans and casual visitors alike a reason to linger at one of Selfridges’ most distinctive bars.

“The Masterclass of Yoga“

Balance.
Focus.
Discipline.
The pursuit of greatness takes
many forms. ⁰⁰The 🐐 of every court.
Featuring @DjokerNole
Directed by Max Siedentopf pic.twitter.com/FwQsjRTPnS

— Lacoste (@Lacoste) June 23, 2026

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London isn’t the first stop on this particular tour. Club Lacoste has already made appearances in New York, Melbourne, Miami and at Roland-Garros in Paris, each activation tailored to its host city while staying anchored to the same core idea: tennis as a lifestyle, not just a sport. The Selfridges residency continues that international rollout, arriving precisely as London’s “biggest summer moment” in tennis gets underway.

What’s notable about the concept is its consistency of tone across markets. Whether it’s popped up courtside at a Grand Slam or inside a department store thousands of miles from a tennis court, Club Lacoste leans on the same visual and sensory language — heritage imagery, sport-inspired cocktails, and a curated retail tie-in. For Selfridges, long known for hosting ambitious brand takeovers, the partnership slots neatly into its track record of turning retail floors into temporary cultural destinations.

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The Fount is normally a 14-seat cocktail bar tucked into the heart of Selfridges’ Accessories Hall on the ground floor, known for its rotating menu of craft cocktails, Champagne and wine. For the next few weeks, it’s been reimagined as a contemporary tennis clubhouse, with design cues pulled from Lacoste’s archives and from the broader visual world of the sport — think clean lines, court-inspired colourways and signage that nods to the brand’s founding era.

Rather than treating the takeover as a simple drinks promotion, Lacoste has used the space to tell a story. Archival displays sit alongside the bar, offering glimpses into founder René Lacoste’s competitive career and the inventions that followed it. It’s a small but considered detail that turns a five-minute cocktail stop into something closer to a mini exhibition, rewarding visitors who take the time to look around rather than just order and leave.

The bar’s regular hours apply throughout the residency: Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 22:00, and Sunday from 10:00 to 22:30 — generous enough to catch both a lunchtime visit and a post-shopping evening drink.

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To better understand why Lacoste keeps returning to tennis as a storytelling device, it helps to revisit the brand’s origin. René Lacoste’s relationship with the sport began as a teenager, sparked by a trip to England at 15. He went on to make his Grand Slam debut at the 1922 Wimbledon Championships and returned to win the Wimbledon singles title twice, in 1925 and again in 1928 — a level of success that made him one of the most accomplished players of his generation and a member of France’s legendary “Four Musketeers” Davis Cup team.

The nickname that gave the brand its emblem is part of tennis folklore. As the story has long been told, Lacoste’s captain promised him a crocodile-skin suitcase if he won an important match; he lost, but the French press picked up on the wager and began calling him “the Crocodile” for his tenacity on court regardless. Lacoste embraced the nickname, and when he later co-founded the brand with André Gillier in 1933, the crocodile became its emblem — reportedly the first time a brand logo had ever appeared on the outside of a garment.

That history is precisely what Club Lacoste leans on. The Selfridges activation isn’t just borrowing tennis as a seasonal theme; it’s referencing a founder who was genuinely one of the sport’s great champions, which gives the pop-up a layer of authenticity that’s harder to fake in a typical brand takeover.

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The centrepiece of the residency is a short, tightly curated cocktail list built around two signature serves, each priced at £17.

The Match Martini takes its cue from matcha rather than the more obvious tennis “match” pun alone, combining Tanqueray No.10 gin with coconut cream and coconut water, ceremonial-grade matcha, fresh lime, and an orange and cardamom cordial. It’s a cocktail built for a warm-weather residency: vegetal and slightly creamy from the matcha and coconut, brightened by citrus, and rounded out with the gentle spice of cardamom. The use of ceremonial-grade matcha — rather than a culinary-grade shortcut — signals that Lacoste and The Fount’s bar team were aiming for something more considered than a novelty drink.

The Croc Classic is the more overtly playful of the two, named directly after René Lacoste’s nickname. It mixes Pimm’s No.1 with orange, fresh lime, pimento, fresh mint, unaged rum, blackberry, more mint, and a homemade sugar syrup. Pimm’s is, of course, already shorthand for a certain kind of English summer — tennis, garden parties, long afternoons outdoors — so building a tennis cocktail around it is a fairly direct nod to the season rather than a subtle one. The addition of unaged rum and pimento gives it a slightly more layered, spiced finish than a traditional Pimm’s cup, while the blackberry and double mint pull it back toward something fresh and drinkable.

Together, the two drinks do a good job of covering different palates: one bright, herbal and unconventional; the other familiar, fruity and rooted in British drinking traditions, but with just enough tweaking to feel bespoke to the occasion.

heritage

The takeover isn’t confined to the bar. Upstairs, Selfridges’ menswear floor is hosting a dedicated Tennis Heritage collection from Lacoste, giving the residency a retail dimension alongside its hospitality one. The collection draws on the brand’s classic “court codes” — the polo shirts, knitwear and tailoring details historically associated with tennis clubs — but presented with what Lacoste describes as a more contemporary edge.

It’s a sensible piece of sequencing from a brand-experience standpoint. Visitors who stop for a Croc Classic or Match Martini downstairs have a clear, short walk to a physical product expression of the same story upstairs, rather than the bar existing purely as a marketing exercise disconnected from anything sellable. For a department store like Selfridges, that kind of vertical integration between an experiential pop-up and an in-store collection is increasingly the standard playbook for successful brand residencies.

idea

For readers who follow Driftzine primarily for shoes, collectibles and streetwear, a tennis-themed cocktail bar might seem like an outlier. It isn’t, really. Tennis has quietly become one of the more influential reference points in contemporary sportswear and footwear design over the past few years, feeding into everything from retro court-shoe reissues to the broader “old money” and prep-adjacent aesthetics that have shaped menswear collections well beyond the court itself.

Lacoste sits at an interesting intersection here: a brand with genuine, century-old sporting credibility, but one that’s also become a recurring reference point in streetwear and collaboration culture, from collegiate-inspired capsule drops to crossovers with labels well outside the tennis world. A residency like Club Lacoste — built on archive storytelling, limited-run product, and a tightly controlled experiential moment — follows much the same logic as the limited sneaker drops and collectible releases this publication covers regularly. The format is different, but the underlying mechanics of scarcity, heritage storytelling and a moment-driven retail activation will feel familiar to anyone who tracks how brands build hype around a release window.

It’s also a useful reminder that London’s tennis fortnight has become its own kind of cultural calendar moment, not unlike a major sneaker release week, with brands timing collaborations, pop-ups and limited products to coincide with the Championships rather than treating tennis purely as a niche sporting interest.

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Club Lacoste at The Fount Bar runs from 22nd June to 12th July, located within Selfridges’ Accessories Hall on the ground floor, with the Tennis Heritage collection housed separately on the menswear floor. Opening hours follow the bar’s usual schedule:

• Monday – Saturday: 10:00 – 22:00
• Sunday: 10:00 – 22:30

No reservation appears necessary to drop in, though given the bar’s intimate 14-seat footprint, visitors hoping to sit at peak hours — particularly during Wimbledon’s opening week — may want to factor in a short wait. Both the Croc Classic and Match Martini are priced at £17, in line with Selfridges’ typical cocktail pricing for a destination bar of this calibre.

fin

Club Lacoste’s stop at Selfridges is a tidy example of how a heritage sports brand can use a temporary hospitality concept to do more storytelling work than a straightforward pop-up shop ever could. By anchoring the residency to René Lacoste’s own Wimbledon history, pairing it with two genuinely distinct cocktails, and linking it to a retail collection one floor up, the brand has built a short-term activation with more depth than its bar-takeover format might initially suggest. With London’s tennis season now in full swing and Wimbledon’s main draw underway from 29th June, the timing puts Club Lacoste squarely in the path of exactly the audience it’s designed for.