In 1999, the Chilean banker Jorge Yarur visited Wimbledon for the first time to watch the championship final. It was a momentous match: Pete Sampras was playing longtime rival Andre Agassi. For hours, the ball spitfired back and forth across the net. Sampras won, the crowd roared. He had scored his record-breaking sixth championship title.
At the Wimbledon Museum, Yarur found himself captivated by something else entirely—the clothes. Tennis trousers and skirts in ivory wool. Ribbed hats. Ruffled polyester dresses. Earlier that year, Yarur had set up a museum in Santiago in his family home. Coming from a long line of textile manufacturers, he wanted to honor garments of the 1950s and 60s. He realized that 20th-century tennis outfits reflected the aesthetic of their time.
Yarur traced tennis back to its first iterations in the 16th century, then to its modern template in 1874, when British Major Walter Wingfield created a game called “sphairistike” (from the Greek “to play with a ball”) and welded together rackets with sheep gut strings. Yarur browsed archives and acquired brushes and centrifuges used to clean balls, as well as rackets with velvet handles and silver bases. He also cataloged pieces owned by 20th-century celebrities, such as Bill Tilden’s 1920s tennis sweater.
Yarur found that tennis fashions sometimes propelled larger trends. For example, the popularity of Lacoste and Stan Smith fueled an aesthetic revolution—preppy clothes became cool again. More recently, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s opposing styles changed fashion across sports. Nadal challenged Federer’s conservative polish with his dark-blue tank tops and messy hair, becoming the Spanish anti-hero.
In 2013, Novak Djokovic and Nadal visited the Museo de la Moda and were astounded by the variety of the exhibits. For the new book The Tennis Collection, Nadal and Gustavo Fernández, Argentina’s current wheelchair tennis champion, have brought over 150 objects from Yarur’s painstaking research—posters, photographs, paintings, and an eclectic array of tennis ephemera—into the spotlight. The book contains original interviews with Djokovic, Guillermo Vilas, Gabriela Sabatini, and Federer, too. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
