A game for people with lawns#
Tennis at the turn of the twentieth century was played at private clubs and country houses, on grass someone else maintained. It came out of Victorian ideas about leisure and etiquette, and it functioned as a social occasion at least as much as a sport.
White fitted that perfectly, and it excluded exactly who it was meant to. Nobody doing physical work for a living wears white. It marks too easily and the cleaning is a job in itself.
The clothes were not built for running#
Early men’s kit was long white flannel trousers, long-sleeved shirts, and often a jacket or a sweater on top.
Showing skin broke etiquette badly enough that a short-sleeved shirt would have registered roughly the way turning up in your underwear would. There are accounts of sweaters worn between matches for warmth, which tells you plainly how athletic the whole thing was.
The kit loosened as the sport got quicker. Shirts got lighter through the 1900s, sleeves shortened, and by mid-century somebody finally admitted that woollen flannels are wrong for running around in the sun. Shorts arrived, cuts opened up, and synthetics that dried faster came in.
White stayed. That’s the tell. Every practical argument changed and the colour didn’t move, because the colour was never solving a practical problem.
What actually broke it#
The 1970s. Television, sponsorship, and brand identity all wanted colour, and synthetic fabrics finally made bold colour and stripes possible. Tournaments dropped the strict codes within about a decade.
Wimbledon didn’t, and still hasn’t, which is a very British outcome.
The sweat theory, tested#
Put the old outfits on in about 25°C and 65% humidity and play actual games, and the results are not what the folklore says.
- Poplin cotton showed obvious sweat marks across the front and back. Flat, smooth, and it clings.
- Piqué cotton hid it noticeably better. The textured weave seems to hold the cloth slightly off the skin, so there’s less contact to darken.
- A knit sweater hid the marks completely — because it’s a sweater sitting over the top, not because of any colour underneath. And it is punishing to wear.
- Full wool flannel with a wool tennis sweater was, by all accounts, absurd, though reportedly not much hotter than the cotton version, which says more about the cotton than the wool.
So white doesn’t hide sweat. Texture does. That’s a genuinely useful finding and it has nothing to do with the tradition it’s meant to justify.
If you want the look anyway#
It’s a good look. Just wear it knowing it’s costume rather than kit.
- Choose piqué over poplin for anything you’ll sweat in. This one is real.
- Skip the wool flannels. All of them.
- Keep long sleeves and sweaters for sitting down, not for playing.
- Period footwear was canvas — PF Flyers were the shoes of the era.
- A reversible summer belt does double duty, white side out for the court.
The heritage version of the sport is now supplied by Ralph Lauren, which is a slightly funny thing for Wimbledon — an American house dressing the most English fixture there is, in the club’s purple and green, with pleated lighter cottons and a bold-striped blazer.
One last piece of trivia worth having: René Lacoste put the crocodile on his blazer first. The shirt came after.
A few small things to try:
- Pick texture over flat weave for hot days. It’s the one bit of this that’s actually functional.
- Wear the whites if you like them, and drop the justification.
- Look at what a dress code is excluding before assuming it’s about performance.
