![]() Style in that bad old era tends to get an unfair rap. Open and the Australian Open, and a canny image manipulator who underscored his cerebral style of play with a Black Ivy cool - tailored shorts, snug polos, horn-rimmed glasses or oversize shades - intentionally engineered to counter racial stereotypes that still plagued the sport in the ’70s. Further along the arc stands Arthur Ashe, the only Black man to have won the singles titles at Wimbledon, the U.S. At one end of the 20th century, there is, for example, an International Tennis Hall of Fame fixture like Budge Patty - one of only three Americans to win the French Open and Wimbledon men’s singles championships in the same year (1950) - and a sophisticate renowned for his easy tailored style both on and off court. Paragons of tennis elegance appear in every era. He went on to found a brand best known for white polo shirts trimmed with a yellow and black band, and the company came perilously close to foundering in 2020 when its polos were co-opted as a militia uniform by the far-right Proud Boys and it was forced to withdraw sales of its polo shirts in the United States and Canada. Perry won eight Grand Slam singles titles in the 1930s, including three consecutive Wimbledon titles from 1934 to 1936. The shirts would become a popped-collar staple of preppy wear.Ĭonsider, too, the unfortunate case of Fred Perry. Take the elegance of players like René Lacoste, the French tennis player of the 1920s nicknamed the Crocodile, who replaced the woven or woolen tennis whites that were then customary with cooler and more efficient long-tailed, short-sleeved cotton polo shirts with the ubiquitous crocodile monogram. From the 19th century on, the courts have been both a laboratory for innovation and, more often than you might imagine, a mirror of social change. Still, what fascinates this observer is the question of why - aside from paid branding opportunities or a dubious assertion that took hold in the late 20th century that color reads better on TV - an athlete would want to deviate from a uniform that is simultaneously practical and sartorially foolproof, one with a rich history of influence on style outside the sport.Įven a cursory survey of its 20th-century history demonstrates how potent an effect tennis has had on fashion. (For present purposes, it is the male athletes who are the focus.) ![]() ![]() Gentlemen, the thinking goes, don’t show off their guns. Look to the controversy that greeted Rafael Nadal when he wore one of his trademark sleeveless white quarter-zip tops in 2005.
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