Despite his record-breaking success, he was treated with contempt by the elite who ran the sport in Britain.
He first became a world table tennis champion at 19 before going on to win three consecutive Wimbledon titles. Perry was the son of a textile factory worker born in Stockport. Fashion was key, but it’s intriguing to see how little the look has shifted for Perryheads, whether they’re on scooters revving around Southend in the 60s or dancing at the 100 Club in the 90s.
In a project for the brand’s 60th anniversary in 2012, Don Letts made a series of films tracing the line of cultural scenes and musical hierarchies that emerged in Britain since the teddy boys of the 1950s. Musicians have been essential to the brand’s credibility, be it the Specials and the Jam or Arctic Monkeys and Skepta. Damon Albarn, Britpop’s poster boy for the knitted cotton Perry pique shirt, was able to request a specific style of eight shirts which he wore for Blur’s reunion gigs in 2009. The line still sells well, particularly in the Far East. The brand has been worn by racist skinheads before McInnes’s lot and, despite its current wobble, is certain to be worn by music fans for some time still.Īmy Winehouse sported hers all over London and ended up collaborating with the brand in 2011 on a collection of Perry classics with Winehouse twists (collars turned up, sleeves capped in semi-sheer fabric). From tennis nuts to Jamaican rudeboys, skinheads, mods, ska-punks, indie kids and Camden popstars, all have done the Perry polo before Proud Boys came along. There is an ironic fashion joke at play: the aesthetic might look objectively square, but its spirit is rebellious.įew brands have been tussled over as hard by competing subcultures. It is not the first time the brand has been fashionable for groups on the fringes of society part of the appeal of a neat, utilitarian Fred Perry polo is that it is subversively nonconformist.
The stylish Fred Perry at Wimbledon in 1934. In a statement to Dazed and Confused magazine, Fred Perry replied: “We believe actions speak louder than words … Our real fans know what we stand for, and their response to this speaks volumes.” In pure Twitter bait, fury and counter-fury spewed online as some white customers claimed they would boycott the brand for “spreading diversity bollocks”. In May, Fred Perry launched a new line with a publicity shoot featuring only models of colour. That look is not a very large and very aggressive and very pink man,” said fashion writer Tony Glenville. It is stern and sensible and needs a distinctive kind of look to pull it off.
“It is easy for the piece to be taken up as uniform because it is designed to look like one. That embroidered circular flick, modelled on the original Wimbledon logo, has been adopted by many subcultures since the first polo was launched in 1952. The statement added: “We are proud of its lineage and what the laurel wreath has represented for over 65 years: inclusivity, diversity and independence.” Fred Perry is unequivocal that it has “absolutely nothing” to do with Proud Boys and that “that association is something we must do our best to end”. “It is incredibly frustrating that this group has appropriated our black and yellow twin-tipped shirt and subverted our laurel wreath to their own ends,” the company said on its website last week.
It is not, by a long stretch, a good look for Fred Perry. His group, much like an enraged Reddit sub-forum given vein-popping physical form, has been described as an alt-right fight club and hate group by Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), as white supremacists by Joe Biden,and classified as an extremist group by the FBI – even though McInnes rejects the notion that Proud Boys are racists. He believes western culture is under siege and that feminism is a cancer. McInnes, 50, is the Scottish-Canadian co-founder of Vice Media, and lives in Brooklyn. And yet, Proud Boys, an organisation allegedly founded as a joke by Gavin McInnes in the run-up the 2016 US election, has become instantly recognisable by its allegiance to Fred Perry’s black and yellow trim polo, forcing the brand to publicly distance itself and announce last week that it had withdrawn sales of the shirt in the US and Canada a year ago. It’s unlikely he could have predicted his name would be used in 2020 to uniform a far-right male militia jacked up on violence and misogyny. W hen British tennis champion Fred Perry became the first player to win a career grand slam in 1935, he might have hoped his legacy would be defined by the stunning bit of history he made, still just 26 years old.