How Tennis Has Shaped Men's Style: From Fred Perry to Wimbledon Street Style
Fashion has been borrowing from tennis for the best part of a century, and Wimbledon fortnight is where you can watch it happen in real time. Some of it arrived through the game's own figures: Fred Perry's flannels, Björn Borg's headband, David Beckham's suits on Henman Hill. Here is how tennis has shaped men's fashion, on court and off it, and why the influence keeps circling back to SW19.
Enter our prize draw to win four style guides and £500 to spend
Shop the Video
For more styling tutorials, subscribe to our channel
Subscribe to Our ChannelFashion's aspirational sport
Why Tennis Has Always Been a Sophisticated Sport to Dress For
Long before Wimbledon existed, tennis was already an indoor pursuit for people with time and money to spare. Real tennis, the game's older ancestor, was played inside walled courts by aristocrats and monarchs, Henry VIII among them. When a Victorian army officer adapted the game for an outdoor lawn in the 1870s, the audience did not change much. Lawn tennis kept the same clientele it had always had: people for whom leisure itself was a kind of status symbol.
That inheritance still shapes how the sport is perceived. Golf carries a similar reputation, and so does polo, and marketing people have a word for what all three share: aspirational. You do not need to play tennis, or even like it, to feel the pull of dressing as though you might. That pull is precisely why the sport keeps exporting its wardrobe to people who have never picked up a racket, and why a walk around the outside courts at Wimbledon still functions as a fairly reliable guide to what well-dressed men are wearing that year.
On the ground this year
What Chris Wore for Wimbledon Street Style This Year
Out filming among the queue and the outside courts, the brief was simple: talk to the better-dressed regulars and find out what had brought them to their choices. The pieces below are what Chris wore while presenting, picked for much the same reasons the spectators he spoke to gave for their own outfits: something with enough pattern to hold its own in bright sun, and enough restraint to still look considered rather than costumed.
Street style at SW19
What Wimbledon Spectators Are Actually Wearing This Year
Away from the history books, what people are actually wearing at Wimbledon this year tells its own story. The dress code for general admission remains famously loose. Nobody is turned away for arriving in shorts and trainers, and dressing for the weather is a perfectly sound strategy given how quickly an English summer can turn. Only the Royal Box holds firm to a jacket-and-tie requirement, a small enclave of formality inside grounds that otherwise leave the decision entirely up to you.
What has changed is how many people outside that enclave are choosing to make an effort regardless. Full suits have become a genuine sighting on the outside courts this year rather than a rarity, including the occasional three-piece, a look that would have read as slightly over-committed a decade ago. Blazers, linen jackets and separate trousers remain the more common route, comfortable enough for a long day of standing and sitting while still reading as deliberate rather than thrown together. Ask people why they bothered, and the answer tends to be some version of the same idea: a day out is better for it, and Wimbledon rewards the attempt in a way few other sporting fixtures do.
The 1930s baseline
How Fred Perry Set the Template for Wimbledon Style
Fred Perry is the obvious place to start. He remains the last British man to have won the singles title outright before Andy Murray ended a seventy-seven year wait in 2013, and his influence on the sport's wardrobe runs just as deep. Perry came from a working-class background that the tennis establishment of his day found faintly awkward, and much of his showmanship on court carried over into how he presented himself off it. Photographs from his three consecutive Wimbledon titles between 1934 and 1936 show him in a white blazer and long white flannel trousers, immaculate by design rather than accident. He is often remembered, his biography included, as one of the last champions to compete in long trousers before shorts took over as the standard.
The cloth itself has not disappeared. Cream flannel in something close to a 1930s weight is still made in Britain today by heritage cloth houses that have been supplying tailors for generations, which tells you something about how good the original silhouette actually was. Perry's own name eventually became better known for the laurel-wreath polo shirt he launched in 1952 than for his eight Grand Slam titles, but the blazer and flannels came first, and they are the reason tennis whites have always carried a whiff of tailoring rather than just sportswear.
Perry was not the only Wimbledon-adjacent player exporting his wardrobe into the mainstream. A decade or so earlier, French champion René Lacoste had grown tired of the stiff, long-sleeved shirts tennis still demanded, and designed himself a loose, short-sleeved piqué cotton shirt to play in instead. Both men's names now sit on two of the most recognised logos in casual clothing, the laurel wreath and the crocodile, and both began as a practical solution to a hot afternoon on court rather than a deliberate fashion statement.
Tennis's golden era
Why the 1980s Remain Tennis Fashion's Most Influential Decade
If Perry set the template, the 1980s is where tennis style became genuinely glamorous, and arguably where it peaked. Björn Borg's headband and shaggy fringe made him instantly recognisable to people who had never watched a full match, and his rivalry with John McEnroe gave the sport two opposing style archetypes at once: Borg's cool Scandinavian restraint against McEnroe's scrappy, headband-and-attitude New York energy. Both looked completely of their moment, and both still look good now, which is rarer than it sounds for anything from that decade.
Ivan Lendl's Adidas kit deserves its own mention. The diamond-pattern knitwear and crisp piping he wore through the mid-1980s captured something close to peak preppy glamour, aspirational in exactly the way tennis clothing is supposed to be. It was also the decade that introduced a generation of British spectators to Italian sportswear labels like Fila and Ellesse, brands that felt genuinely exotic on a school playground in a way that is difficult to explain to anyone who did not grow up watching Wimbledon on a Sunday afternoon. Tennis had, by this point, become one of the more effective marketing channels sportswear had ever found, decades before anyone used that phrase.
What made the decade so influential was the sheer range of looks a single tournament could produce. A viewer could watch Borg's understated cool in one match and McEnroe's more combative energy in the next, then see Lendl's precise, branded knitwear an hour later, and each felt like a genuinely different proposition rather than a variation on the same theme. Later decades of tennis fashion have rarely offered that much contrast within a single fortnight, which is a large part of why the 1980s still gets cited as the sport's stylistic high-water mark.
Grass to leisurewear
How 1930s Tennis Whites Shaped Ralph Lauren's Preppy Aesthetic
The line from tennis whites to modern preppy style runs more or less straight through Ralph Lauren. The cream flannel trousers, the cable-knit cricket sweaters, the loose knitted ties that Perry's generation wore between sets, all of it reads today as the founding vocabulary of American Ivy style, and Lauren has spent five decades translating that vocabulary into one of the most successful fashion businesses in the world. It is not a coincidence. Lauren has always cited early twentieth-century sportswear, tennis and polo both, as the wellspring of the entire Polo Ralph Lauren aesthetic.
The relationship has since become official rather than just aesthetic. Ralph Lauren became Wimbledon's official outfitter in 2006, which means the brand now designs the umpire and ball boy uniforms as well as the wider tournament merchandise, closing a loop that started with a Stockport-born tennis champion in white flannels roughly ninety years earlier. Watch Centre Court today and you are, in a fairly literal sense, watching a brand built on 1930s tennis whites dressing the 2020s version of the sport that inspired it.
The return of tailoring
Why David Beckham Has Helped Bring Tailoring Back to Wimbledon
Tennis's traditional off-court uniform was always the blazer rather than the full suit. Blue or navy, worn over flannels or linen trousers, it was the standard because it read as smart without being formal, exactly the register a day of standing, walking and sitting in variable weather actually calls for. In recent years, though, spectators have started reaching one level up. Full suits, and even the occasional three-piece, have become a genuine feature of the crowd rather than a rare sighting reserved for the Royal Box.
David Beckham's name comes up more than most when you ask people where the current appetite for tailoring at Wimbledon started. He has long been a visible supporter of the tournament, and he has almost never turned up in anything less considered than a well-cut suit. Whether or not you trace the whole trend back to a single influence, the practical result is the same: a genuinely well-tailored jacket and a knitted tie now do just as much work on Henman Hill as a blazer and open collar ever did, without looking like you are trying too hard.
There is a practical case for the shift too. A soft-shouldered jacket in a breathable wool travels just as well through a warm afternoon as a blazer does, and it photographs considerably better in the queue or on the concourse, where most of this year's better outfits were actually spotted. The suit has stopped being reserved for hospitality and started functioning as a genuine style choice for anyone willing to commit to it for the day.
On court versus off it
How Wimbledon's All-White Rule Shaped What You See Today
Set against all of this history, the modern rule for players themselves looks almost severe by comparison. Wimbledon's dress code now requires players to wear predominantly white, with only minimal trim permitted around the neckline, sleeves and waistband. The rule's origins are usually traced back to Victorian ideas about propriety, sweat stains being considered improper for public display, though the club has tightened rather than relaxed the requirement over the decades rather than loosened it as fashions elsewhere have relaxed. Perry's cream flannels or Lendl's diamond-knit Adidas kit would not clear the current bar.
The result is an interesting inversion. The all-white rule has made the players themselves more uniform than at any point in the tournament's history, while the crowd has quietly become the place where personality and colour actually live. A patterned tie, a coloured pocket square or a checked jacket now stands out more at Wimbledon than it would almost anywhere else, precisely because the players on court are no longer allowed to provide any of that contrast themselves.
1980s Tennis Style
- Diamond-knit jumpers and bold branding on court
- Colour and pattern used as personal signature
- Headbands and sweatbands as style statements
- Sportswear brands built almost entirely on tennis exposure
Wimbledon Style Today
- Predominantly white required on court, minimal trim only
- Colour and pattern have migrated to the crowd instead
- Tailoring, not sportswear, is the spectator's statement piece
- Heritage brands now supply the tournament's official uniforms
What it means for you
What Tennis's Style Legacy Means for How You Dress Today
None of this history is really an argument for costume. Nobody needs a headband or a full Perry-era blazer-and-flannels combination to make the point. What is worth borrowing is the underlying logic each era followed: pick pieces with enough character to hold their own outdoors, keep the silhouette relaxed enough to survive several hours of standing and sitting, and let a single considered detail, a knitted tie, a patterned pocket square, do the talking rather than the whole outfit shouting at once.
If you are working out what to actually wear for a day at the tennis yourself, rather than just enjoying the history of it, our full guide to dressing for Wimbledon covers the practical side in more depth, from what the Royal Box actually expects to how to dress for a full day on Henman Hill. Between the two pieces, you should have both the reasoning and the wardrobe sorted before you reach the queue.
Frequently asked questions
Your Questions About Tennis and Men's Fashion Answered
How has tennis influenced mainstream men's fashion?
Tennis has fed mainstream menswear for close to a century, from Fred Perry's white flannels and blazers in the 1930s through to the knitwear and branding of the 1980s. Its biggest legacy is probably indirect: the cream flannels and cable knits worn on court in the early twentieth century became the founding vocabulary for American preppy style, most visibly through Ralph Lauren.
Why do Wimbledon players have to wear all white?
Wimbledon requires players to wear predominantly white with only minimal trim, a rule with roots in Victorian attitudes toward modesty and visible sweat. Unlike most sporting dress codes, which have loosened over time, Wimbledon's all-white rule has actually tightened, ruling out the coloured kit and bold branding that players like Ivan Lendl wore in earlier decades.
Is Ralph Lauren connected to Wimbledon?
Yes. Ralph Lauren has been Wimbledon's official outfitter since 2006, designing the umpire and ball boy uniforms as well as wider tournament merchandise. The relationship makes sense given the brand's own history, since Ralph Lauren's preppy aesthetic draws heavily on the cream flannels and knitwear worn in tennis's earliest decades.
Why is David Beckham linked to a return of tailoring at Wimbledon?
David Beckham has long been a visible Wimbledon supporter and a consistently elegant dresser, and his name comes up often when spectators are asked about their style influences. His regular appearances in well-cut suits have coincided with a broader shift toward proper tailoring in the crowd, where a blazer and open collar was once the more typical standard.
What did tennis players wear before shorts became standard?
Before shorts became the norm, male players typically wore long white flannel trousers with a blazer or knitted sweater, the look most closely associated with Fred Perry's Wimbledon titles in the 1930s. The heavier cream flannel from that era is still produced by British cloth houses today, largely unchanged in weight and finish.
To shop the pieces built for a considered day at the tennis, click below.