When Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton arrived at the 2015 Wimbledon final wearing a floral shirt, gray trousers and a fedora, the All England Club turned him away from the Royal Box. The culprit was a missing tie. So a man who has spent his career focused on sponsor logos and fireproof Nomex, who treats the booth like a runway, is kicked out of the 74 most coveted tennis seats because no one on his team ever mentioned that the room runs in a coat and tie—and, unable to get it in time, he watches the game from a hospitality chair instead, clapping Anna as she claps. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to a guest at Wimbledon, and it draws a line that lives by the whole tournament: the club controls its players without mercy and its crowd at all.
It's less compelling than lifting postcards. Ordinary viewers are not at all concerned with the type of dress. Win a ticket on the ballot or find one in the fairy tale line, and you can win almost anything, as long as you keep your shirt open and your hat low enough to leave the row behind you. Panama hats, linen blazers and sundresses fit the attire that the crowd agreed to wear when no one wanted to—an English summer made for people who paid for seats. The real crowd-pleasers are edible: over 300,000 cups of Pimm's, the official cup of the tournament since the 1970s and a quarter of a million bowls of strawberries and cream across the fortnight. The real codes only appear as the rooms get smaller and the company gets bigger. Hospitality calls for smart-casual. The Member Fence is strong. The Royal Box uses full protocol, suits and evening dresses, with invitations issued at the chairman's discretion from a guest list that has hosted kings since 1922. Royal Ascot tests its top hats in the turning area. Wimbledon will let you dress up as anything, and then sit you down in front of the fence.
Its players are not shown the same favor. The Wimbledon dress code is the most difficult in professional sports, and it does not leave a day to be defined: the competitors must wear clothes “completely white,” and white, the club is careful to clarify, “does not include white or cream.” The law is Victorian in both origin and instinct. In the respectable textile of the 1870s, the visible bloom of sweat registered as disrespectful, and white concealed it more graciously than any color—a matter of respectability that neatly doubled as a class filter, since the spotless wardrobe demanded both money and labor to maintain it. Over the past decades, decorum has solidified into something close to literature. A colored band is permitted on the collar and cuff, provided it is more than three-eighths of an inch wide. The soles of the shoes and the laces must remain white until the end of the eyes. Officials still check the kit before a game and return the wrong one to the locker room to change. The result is undeniably beautiful, the entire court reduced to one pure idea of green and white—enforced with a measuring tape.
People have been exploring it for the better part of a century, and that exploration is a lot of history to be told. The first to really rock the club was Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran, who in 1949 walked onto Center Court wearing a lace-trimmed skirt made by the tournament's couturier, Ted Tinling. They stood out when he got the ball—the whole scandal: the committee accused him of dragging profanity into the game; anger reached the floor of Parliament; and Tinling—a fixture at Wimbledon for decades—was iced for the next 33 years. His punishment set a pattern that each generation has joyfully revived. Andre Agassi, the American in charge of denim and neon, boycotted the place from 1988 to 1990 instead of submitting to white people, then he came back and won the title in 1992, wearing his head and leg in the law he defied. Anne White competed in the 1985 pageant in a full-length ivory suit and was asked, with much fanfare, never to do it again. Tatiana Golovin slipped red under her dress in 2007 and survived with the help of hemlines. Roger Federer's orange soles were officially banned in 2013, and the club tightened its footwear rules the following year to ensure that. Venus Williams was sent to change the fuchsia bra during the 2017 rain delay. Nick Kyrgios, in 2022, swallowed a wardrobe fine that later put him close to $10,000 rather than handing over the red cap and red Jordans he wore off the court.
The code was purposefully bent only once, and the cause is long gone. In 2023, after years of players expressing fear of competing in white during their period, the club rewrote the rule to allow black shorts under the whites. Billie Jean King had pushed for change for years; Coco Gauff bluntly stated that it would suggest a real source of stress; Heather Watson has admitted that she once put her birth control period into a painting. It was rare for the club to listen to people in uniform, and nothing changed for the viewer.
For all its difficulties—or perhaps because of them—white law has served as an unlikely incubator for the fashion industry. Suzanne Lenglen defied the grass circa 1920 in a Jean Patou sleeveless skirt, unarmed and shockingly short, the first time couture and competitive tennis had shared the court. René Lacoste sewed a crocodile on his shirt and built an entire house on top of the motif. Fred Perry captured three consecutive championships in the mid-1930s and spun the club's laurels into a symbol that outlasted his playing days by half a century. Since 2006, Ralph Lauren has dressed referees, line judges and ball boys (the first designer in the history of the tournament to hold the contract); It is reported that Lauren wanted the officials to wear white and was rejected and told to promote the players. And the most popular looks of the modern game all worked within the cage rather than against it—Roger Federer's cream cabled card in 2008, its buttons turned by hand to mark five straight titles, and the gold-embellished blazer in 2009, the wardrobe of a man dressed for a coronation he intended to fully reward himself with.
This is a strange transaction that the All England Club made 150 years ago, which may have been pointless. The hedges are always trimmed, the linens are always white, and anyone who hopes to be remembered must be sharper than the law was designed to contain them. A small palette, it turns out, is the hardest thing to give a designer. And the club that owns half an inch of trim still crowns winners by hand—the Princess of Wales, its patron, descends from the Royal Box every July to present the awards, the last official flourishes of the two days they're built on.
