Tennis

(The wardrobe of tennis). The earliest followers Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who in 1873, in Great Britain, invented the rules of the sport derived from the “jeu de paume,” the ancient French game of lawn tennis, would wear simple, bright white flannels: long belted, narrow-waisted trousers and shirts with collars and cuffs. To tell the truth, the only clear regulation that can be found in the announcment for the first matches of Wimbledon, published on 9 June 1877 in the newspaper, The Field, refers to the shoes, which had to be heel-less. At any rate, this was, for many years, the classic outfit for tennis, with the concession of rolling up one’s sleeves in order to be freer to move, as Spencer W. Gore had done, the first winner on grass of the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, and with very few variants, documented by the prints and photographs of the last decades of the nineteenth century: the knickerbockers or plus-fours and the shirt with horizontal stripes that seem to have been the clothing worn by the stronger of the Renshaw twins, Willie, seven-time winners in singles at Wimbledon. Less concerned with etiquette, the Americans, who were soon won over the new English pastime, resolved the problem by donning the usual outfit worn for strolling or for baseball, including the colorful hat with a bill. Women, whether in the old continent or the new world, stoically gripped their rackets dressed in flowing skirts, with crinolines, corsets, heavy underwear, heels, and little caps, even after 1884, when they were permitted to take part in the London competition. Reacting to all this elaborate nineteenth-century elegance was Maud Watson, along with her sister Lillian. Maud was an unbeaten champion, from 1881 to 1886, in 55 matches. She chose to opt for a certain simplicity, carrying out a bland revolution by dressing exclusively in white and eliminating from her silk shirt the stiff closed collar with a bowtie or a tie. Italian female tennis players were given a few interesting suggestions, though they were vague concerning style, in the magazine Margherita dated 15 September 1891: “For tennis, an amusement that has become universally popular, costumes are being created that are lovely and appropriate, and woolen fabrics with balls, sticks, and triangular, either painted or woven, are the ones that are most popular.” Added to these, the following years, were striped fabrics, considered “proper for tennis outfits.” It would take until the new century before the skirt became a few inches shorter and the sleeves were shortened to half length, thanks to the American female tennis player May Sutton, who, in 1905, was the first foreigner to write her name in the golden album at Wimbledon. About fifteen years of gradual, yet daring conquests in the emancipation of the clothing took place and behold, at the beginning of the 1920s, the “Divine” Suzanne Lenglen showed her calves, while in her inimitable style she floated lightly through the air, showing off the creations signed by no less a designer than Jean Patou, and turbans made of dyed tulle, matching the cardigans fastened with a long line of buttons. Tennis fashion had reached a level of refinement made up of lovely sweaters and soft pleated skirts, increasingly likely to rise above the knee. It was the elegance as well of Helen Wills, the “Queen” (8 victories at Wimbledon between 1927 and 1938), that gave it a further touch of light elegance with the small white visor that she invented herself. The decade of the 1930s showed that the time had come for short pants. If, at the end of the 1920s, the Spanish player Lilli de Alvarez had worn (tulle) shorts beneath her skirt, in 1933 Helen Jacobs won the women’s championship of the United States dressed in daring shorts “that were a full hand’s breadth above the knee!” In men’s tennis as well there were those who felt that the austere and burdensome city trousers were obsolete, and cut them down to shorts. The innovator was Bunny Austin, a student at Cambridge “who always had his nose stuck in his damned book of Shakespeare” and an ace at tennis; in 1933 with Fred Perry he took the Davis Cup from the renowned “French Musketeers.” Even though Austin no longer suffered from the cramps that he had suffered when he was playing “in full regalia,” among the gentlement long pants resisted the change for many years still to come. But as we know full well, short pants wound up prevailing, and gradually abandoning the comical form of loose underwear, and they found the ideal companion for their tennis existence: the piqué polo shirt, invented by René Lacoste, the “Crocodile,” and destined to worldwide fame and longevity. With respect to the measurements of the clothing worn on court, the ladies were every bit as aggressive. Shorts and skirts (short and often extremely short) became their variegated uniform, and on that uniform they happily applied all of the seductions of fashion. Their standard-bearers could be considered, between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, Gussy Moran, who was, rightly enough, rebaptized Gorgeous Gussy and whose lace-trimmed panties and especially black shorts, in lamé or leopard-skin are still remembered and, for the 1960s, the Brazilian player Maria Ester Bueno, whose salmon-pink outfit with its teardrop neckline and fourteen rows of lace under the skirt caused shock and scandalized the twelve Elders of the Board of Directors of the All-England Lawn Tennis Club. Wimbledon remained for many years a citadel of austere clothing and was the last to surrender to the spirit of 1968: a revolutionary wind howled through the realms of lawn tennis as well, which became “open,” that is, accessible to professionals as well, and among the various things consumed in the bonfire of traditions, tennis whites were included. The 1970s were colorful, extremely colorful; cheerfully colorful with all the hues of the rainbow, even the most unusual ones, and garish with surprising patterns, such as the American-flag tennis outfit worn by the American player Rosemary Casals. At the same time other phenomena were beginning to develop and would not cease, such as a heightened research into an ever-changing array of fabrics and materials, increasingly technical, as well as the growing use of sports apparel in everyday life, and the triumph of Italian style in the world of tennis as well. “The list of tennis pros who wear Italian style on the court — wrote a specialized French magazine in 1980 — is astonishing: among the top fifty in the ATP ranking, twenty-nine.” They were Borg, McEnroe, Gerulaitis, Tanner, and Vilas, to whom we should add, to mention just one representative of the gentler sex, a champion as elegant in her bearing as Chris Evert. It was a splendid period in terms of sports competition, but also a remarkable period for tennis fashion, which, with the 1980s, recovered all its inborn refinement. The apparel was often created by famous Italian fashion designers (Valentino at the lead), unrivaled in making the clothing comfortable, free, and white (without abandoning color entirely), essential and yet rich in creativity. From then on, we have sort of lost some of the style of that fashion which, referring in particular to the early years of the twentieth century, Gianni Versace considered “very refined in terms of the image of white, with these stripes, these polo shirts, these short pleated skirts.” The times had turned to non-conformism, indifference to rules, an absolute and much-heralded freedom, a time of “I’ll wear what I happen to have or whatever I feel like wearing,” and it spread to the tennis court as well. Even the polo shirt was forced on some occasions to modify itself in order to keep up with the times. Provocative necklines and mini-minis were the preferred outfits of Serena and Venus Williams, the sisters who often played against one another in the finals of a Grand Slam. The elegance of a distant time was forgotten.