The Fred Perry Shirt Put a Wimbledon Wreath on Every Subculture's Chest

In 1936 Fred Perry won his third Wimbledon singles title in a row. At the end of that season he turned professional. No British man would win the title again until Andy Murray in 2013. Sixteen years after that last win, his name came back to Wimbledon on something new. It was a short-sleeved white shirt in knitted cotton piqué, and it had a small laurel wreath stitched on the left breast.

The shirt was launched at Wimbledon in 1952. It has since been worn by people a very long way from any tennis court.

A table tennis champion first

Fred Perry was born on May 18, 1909, in Portwood, Stockport, near Manchester. Before he was a tennis player he was a table tennis player, and a very good one. He won the singles at the 1929 World Championships in Budapest. His three Wimbledon titles came in 1934, 1935 and 1936, according to Wikipedia's biography.

The clothing business started with a stranger. In the late 1940s Tibby Wegner, an Austrian former footballer, approached Perry with a device he had invented, an anti-perspirant band worn around the wrist. Perry reworked it into the first sweatband. The bands were made in Leicester, and the partnership that produced them went on to produce the shirt.

The shirt and the wreath

Perry did not invent the tennis shirt. René Lacoste first wore a short-sleeved shirt in jersey petit piqué cotton on court in 1926, began putting a crocodile on the left breast in 1927, and founded Chemise Lacoste to sell it in 1933. Ralph Lauren marketed his own version as a polo shirt in his Polo line from 1972, which helped make the style, and the name, universal.

What Perry added was a British champion's name and a symbol borrowed from the tournament he had owned. The laurel wreath was based on the original Wimbledon emblem, and the laurel itself is an old Roman sign of victory. The 1952 shirt was white knitted cotton piqué, with short sleeves and a buttoned placket, and at launch it came in only two colours, white and black.

The original model, usually called the M3, was soon joined by the M12, with twin stripes of colour tipped around the collar and cuffs. The retailer Atom Retro repeats the story that a buyer from the London sports shop Lillywhites asked for football club colours on the collar, and labels it a legend rather than a record, which is the right way to treat it. Today the M12 is still made in Leicester, where it is knitted, dyed, cut, embroidered and finished by hand, and it is cut slightly boxier than the brand's everyday twin-tipped shirt.

Who wore it

The shirt left the tennis club quickly. Mods adopted it in the 1960s, when a neat collared shirt with a small badge suited a subculture built on sharp, careful dressing. James Bond wore Fred Perry in Thunderball in 1965. From the 1970s to the early 1980s skinheads and mod revivalists made it part of their uniform.

That was where the trouble started. According to Wikipedia's history of the label), in the later 1980s the brand became associated with the far-right National Front and slid toward the margins. The rescue came from music. In the mid-1990s Blur adopted the brand and revived its popularity in Britain, and indie fans followed.

Perry died in Melbourne on February 2, 1995. The same year, the Japanese company Hit Union bought the business.

Here is the shirt's life in dates, drawn from the sources above. The timeline is Quiet Menace's own.

Who it refused

The modern company has had to say out loud who the wreath is for. In October 2010 it released a 17-piece collection designed with Amy Winehouse, and Wikipedia records that 20 percent of its net revenue went to the Amy Winehouse Foundation. In July 2012 it began a collaboration with the cyclist Bradley Wiggins. Andy Murray, the man who would end Britain's long wait at Wimbledon, wore the brand when he reached the 2008 US Open final, which he lost to Roger Federer. That deal put the wreath back on a British contender, and it ended in 2009.

Then came the Proud Boys, an American far-right group that took up the black shirt with yellow tipping. In 2017 the company's chief executive, John Flynn, denounced the association. In 2019 Fred Perry stopped selling the black and yellow shirt in the United States, and in September 2020 it said it would not sell it there again until the link was broken. A brand founded on a champion's name decided that some customers were costing it more than they paid.

The business itself is healthy. In 2022 revenue rose 20.8 percent to £135.7 million, and the same year the company closed its two Russian shops, in Moscow and St Petersburg, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Wikipedia puts 2024 revenue at £154.1 million, with more than 200 stores, and the company employs about 290 people in Britain. Some of the range is still made in Leicester, the city where the sweatbands were made.

Buying one now

Start with white or navy and a twin-tipped collar if you want the shirt everyone recognises, or a plain collar if you want it quieter. The Leicester-made M12 fits a little looser. Wear it with the top button undone. Given the shirt's history, a fully buttoned collar says more than it used to.

It sits with the other British and American classics in a good wardrobe. Our histories of the Oxford cloth button-down and the white T-shirt cover its nearest relatives, and the Baracuta G9 Harrington is another British piece from the same postwar decades. For another British clothing story, read our profile of the designer Paul Smith. Atom Retro's guide to the Fred Perry shirt explains the model numbers in more detail. For more, see menswear history, heritage brands and the Quiet Menace style section.

Perry won Wimbledon three times and then walked away from it. The shirt he launched there in 1952 is now the most common way his name gets said.