Dressing for the court

A hundred and forty years of arguments about what tennis players may wear

When women first competed at the championships in south-west London in the 1880s, they did so in clothing that had been designed for a garden party and adapted for sport by the simple expedient of not adapting it at all. The costume comprised a corset, a bustle, a long-sleeved bodice, a skirt reaching the ground and, in most photographs of the period, a hat. Contemporary accounts note that players were expected to remain decorous, and the clothing enforced the expectation more effectively than any regulation could have done. Movement was restricted to a walk and a reach; the serve was underarm because an overarm action was scarcely possible in a corset; and the resulting game bore only a distant relation to the one now played.

There were practical consequences beyond the game itself. Tennis was one of the few sports in which women competed in public before a mixed audience, and what they were permitted to wear on court was therefore argued over by people with no interest in tennis at all. Dress reformers cited the game in support of looser clothing generally; their opponents cited it as evidence of where such reforms led. The players, who had to run in whatever was decided, were seldom consulted.

The first sustained challenge came in the 1920s from a French player of exceptional ability whose principal weapon, in the view of her critics, was not her forehand but her wardrobe. She appeared in a pleated dress that stopped at mid-calf, with bare forearms, no corset and a coloured band around her hair, and she was described in the press as indecent by people who had watched her win. The point that survives from the episode is that she was also unmistakably the best player of her generation, and that the two facts were connected. Clothing that permitted a full stride and an overarm serve was not a statement about morality; it was equipment.

Men's clothing changed later and, initially, with more embarrassment. Long flannel trousers remained standard until a British player walked onto court in shorts in the 1930s, an act reported as though it were a minor scandal and imitated within a season. The change followed the same logic as before: shorts were cooler, allowed a longer stride and rapidly became universal because the players who wore them moved better than the players who did not. In both cases the innovation was denounced on grounds of propriety and adopted on grounds of performance, and performance won each time within a few years. It is worth noting how short those few years were. A change that was scandalous in one season was unremarkable by the third and compulsory, in practice, by the fifth, because a player who declined to adopt it was conceding an advantage to everyone who had.

The most famous costume controversy of the following decade concerned an American player whose designer trimmed her shorts with lace, visible when she stretched. Photographers lay on the ground to capture the detail, the committee expressed its displeasure, and the affair occupied the newspapers for weeks. It is remembered as a scandal about propriety, but it also marks something else: the point at which a player's clothing became commercially interesting in its own right, and therefore something manufacturers had reason to design rather than merely supply. From that point the sequence changes character. Earlier alterations had been made by players for their own convenience and resisted by committees; later ones were proposed by sportswear companies with a commercial interest in being noticed, and the resistance of committees became part of the publicity rather than an obstacle to it.

The materials, meanwhile, were being transformed by chemistry rather than by fashion. Cotton and wool absorb perspiration, grow heavy and stay wet, and a match played in humid conditions was once contested in progressively heavier clothing. Synthetic fibres developed for other industries were adapted to move moisture away from the skin to the surface of the fabric, where it evaporates, and the modern tennis shirt weighs a fraction of its predecessor while remaining dry. This is the least discussed and probably the most consequential change of all, since it acts on every point of every match rather than on the appearance of a few. Shoes have followed the same trajectory, from plimsolls that offered nothing to a sliding foot to constructions engineered for the specific surface a tournament is played on, and rackets have changed out of all recognition. None of these developments produced a scandal, because none of them was visible.

The tournament that began the story retains the strictest rule about appearance in professional sport, requiring competitors to dress almost entirely in white, a stipulation that originated in the Victorian preference for concealing perspiration rather than in any aesthetic principle. It has survived a century of complaint, and its defenders argue that it is precisely the arbitrariness of the tradition that gives the event its character. It has nevertheless been amended: from 2023, women have been permitted to wear dark undershorts, following complaints from players that anxiety about menstruation while dressed entirely in white affected their concentration. The change is small, and it is of a piece with everything that preceded it. Each alteration in a hundred and forty years has been resisted as a breach of decorum and accepted, in the end, because the players who make the argument are the ones who have to play in the clothes.