In general, you can detect laser with solar panels. There is intensive research on possibilities of employing lasers in wireless power transmission (Laser Power Beaming). Laser Power Beaming have already been used in order to provide energy for remotely controlled machines (example).
It is my belief that we are 20-30 years from the point when Laser Power Beaming from orbital based photovoltaic power collectors (satellites) will be possible (remember SimCity?).
That said, it seems like you are not that into wireless power transmission. I guess you want to use laser as means of transmitting some information to an electrical circuits which get attached to humans clothes, right?
Well, I've seen (and used) few military combat simulation systems which employ lasers in order to allow soldiers to shoot at each other (without killing each other). Even those systems which are vehicle mounted did not use photovoltaic cells in order to detect laser radiation.
We could provide you with a bunch of information about photovoltaics and lasers, but I believe that your initial direction is incorrect. You can use several photodiodes scattered over the body in order to increase the coverage of your system - it will be cheaper, simpler and much more durable approach.
If sensitivity is your concern, you might want to check out for photomultiplier. These devices have very high sensitivity, but are more complex and more expensive than photodiodes. They are also much more prone to mechanical damage.
Assuming that the laser tag variant will be played in relative darkness, not in daylight, a thin film photovoltaic cell (TFPV) or thin film solar cell of requisite thickness and flexibility could serve as a wide-area photodetector.
TFPV cells are available that use very thin, yet tear-resistant polyimide substrate, which can be cut and sewn into, for instance, the top surface of a jacket or cap.
The challenge will be distinguishing a relatively small area exposed to the laser, as opposed to the overall photovoltaic surface being exposed to ambient light. Clearly, if the intensity of the laser is not significantly higher than the combined ambient light that may be incident on the entire surface of the clothing, this won't work. Unfortunately increasing the laser intensity leads to laser eye safety concerns.
Permissible eye-safe laser power is pretty low, typically single-digit milliwatts for visible lasers, and fractional milliwatts for IR or UV lasers - keep in mind that eye safety concerns apply even to brief accidental exposure to the laser from very close, such as if a player accidentally triggers the laser tag gun while looking into it.
The solution is to use a TFPV sheet that consists of a multitude of separate cells, rather than one large photosensing area, for instance:
(source)
The detection mechanism would need to sense individual PV cells within the mesh. The cell which produces an anomalously high voltage would be the one with a laser beam incident upon it - all the other cells would have lower baseline voltages representative of the ambient light upon each.
Color differentiation would not work for source identification, if using the TFPV approach: Consider a tiny red laser spot, a tiny green laser spot, and a larger surface area illuminated by the laser tag arena lighting: The PV cells would not be able to distinguish between these.
Another challenge with using TFPV material is that signal rise times are pretty slow - and slower for larger cell sizes. Using multiple smaller cells mitigates this somewhat.
Therefore, traditionally used signal modulation for distinguishing between different light sources, e.g. 38 KHz pulse modulation as used in infrared remotes, will not work. A much slower modulation frequency, and identification of distinct code sequences from different emitters, would be the way to go.
Best Answer
While I don't know all the design or budgetary constraints of your problem, from the technical point of view it should be very doable. I would find a narrow bandpass optical filter (with the center of the band at the wavelength of the laser) that I would place in front of my optical detector to filter out all the stray light. While APD (or even a PMT) would give you the best results, optical PIN diode (check Hamamatsu diodes) would suffice for your application. You just need to follow it with a good quality amplifier.
As to the research material, I would look up stuff on the design of flow cytometers or other flouresence detection systems. These instruments are able to detect much weaker optical signals at a rate of 10k events/second.