Welcome to the Summer of Sports. The old sparkle safari—Coachella to Cannes to Couture to Ibi(th)a to Posi to Burning Man—has quietly been replaced by more active doings: courtside at the Garden, the Coaches Club at MetLife, the Royal Box at Wimbledon, the paddock at Silverstone, and back to the President’s Box at Arthur Ashe. The sparkle ponies have decamped from the playa to the players’ box, and fashion has followed suit, because fashion goes where the spectacle is—being, after all, a spectator sport itself, another wing of the same global business of show. But of every arena now on the circuit, it is tennis, and Wimbledon above all, that fashion has made its own (see: Ralph Lauren, who has left his indelible purple-and-green mark all over the tourney since 2006).
The reason is a family resemblance most people miss: fashion and tennis are the same game. Both run on an elaborate, seemingly arbitrary code that everyone agrees to take very, very seriously—and a spectatorship that answers any breach of it with the proprietary rage of a jilted lover. The All England Club approves each player’s outfit a full year in advance, down to the width of a stripe. (Just imagine: the dangerously suggestive “darkundershorts” worn by female players beneath their skirts were not permitted until 2023!) And only last week the seductive phantom of Spanish player Jessica Bouzas’s black undershirt, made visible by her sweat, itself the product of the very un-English heatwave passing over SW19, was millimeters away from getting her banned!
