The Most Memorable On-Court Style Moments in Wimbledon History

When the Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton arrived at the 2015 Wimbledon final in a floral shirt, gray trousers and a fedora, the All England Club refused him at the door of the Royal Box. The offense was a missing tie. So a man who has spent his career draped in sponsor logos and fireproof Nomex, who treats a paddock like a runway, was turned away from the most coveted 74 seats in tennis because nobody on his team had mentioned that the room runs on jacket and tie—and, unable to find one in time, he watched the match from a hospitality seat instead, applauding Djokovic and Federer a few places down from Anna Wintour. It is the most telling thing that has ever happened to a guest at Wimbledon, and it draws the line the rest of the tournament lives by: the club polices its players without mercy and its crowd hardly at all.

What it enforces is narrower than the postcards suggest. Ordinary spectators face no dress code whatsoever. Win a ticket in the ballot or earn one in the legendary Queue, and you may turn up in nearly anything, so long as you keep your shirt on and your hat low enough to spare the row behind you. The Panama hats, the linen blazers and the sundresses amount to a costume the crowd has agreed to wear with nobody demanding it—an English summer performed by the people who paid for a seat. The crowd’s true indulgences are edible: more than 300,000 cups of Pimm’s, the tournament’s official cup since the 1970s and a quarter-million bowls of strawberries and cream across the two weeks. The real codes surface only as the rooms shrink and the company grows grander. Hospitality asks for smart-casual. The Members’ Enclosure is strict. The Royal Box runs on full protocol, suits and afternoon dresses, its invitations issued at the chairman’s discretion to a guest list that has seated monarchs since 1922. Royal Ascot checks its top hats at the turnstile. Wimbledon will let you in dressed as anything at all, then sit you down in front of a hedge.

Its players are shown no equivalent mercy. Wimbledon’s dress code is the most exacting in professional sport, and it leaves no daylight for interpretation: competitors must wear attire that is “almost entirely white,” and white, the club takes care to specify, “does not include off-white or cream.” The rule is Victorian in both origin and instinct. In the polite tennis of the 1870s, a visible bloom of sweat registered as indecent, and white hid it more graciously than any color—a matter of etiquette that doubled neatly as a class filter, since a spotless wardrobe demanded both money and the staff to maintain it. Over the decades, decorum hardened into something nearer to scripture. A band of color is allowed at the collar and the cuff, provided it runs no wider than three-eighths of an inch. Shoe soles and laces must stay white down to the eyelet. Officials still inspect kit before play and return the improperly dressed to the locker room to change. The effect is undeniably elegant, a whole court reduced to one clean idea in green and white—enforced with a tape measure.

People have been testing it for the better part of a century, and that testing is most of the history worth telling. The first to truly rattle the club was Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran, who in 1949 walked onto Centre Court in lace-trimmed knickers sewn by the tournament’s own couturier, Ted Tinling. They flashed into view when she reached for a ball—the entire scandal: the committee accused her of dragging vulgarity into the game; the outrage reached the floor of Parliament; and Tinling—a Wimbledon fixture for decades—was frozen out for the next 33 years. His punishment set a template that every generation since has gleefully revived. Andre Agassi, the American with the denim and the neon, boycotted the place from 1988 through 1990 rather than submit to its whites, then came back and won the title outright in 1992, dressed head to toe in the rule he had spurned. Anne White contested a 1985 match in a full-length ivory catsuit and was asked, with great delicacy, never to repeat it. Tatiana Golovin slipped red beneath her dress in 2007 and survived on a technicality of hemlines. Roger Federer’s orange soles were outlawed in 2013, and the club tightened its footwear rules the following year to ensure it. Venus Williams was sent to change a fuchsia bra strap during a 2017 rain delay. Nick Kyrgios, in 2022, swallowed a wardrobe fine he later put near $10,000 rather than surrender the red cap and red Jordans he wore off court.

The code has bent meaningfully only once, and the cause was long overdue. In 2023, after years of players describing the particular dread of competing in white while menstruating, the club rewrote the rule to permit dark undershorts beneath the whites. Billie Jean King had pressed for the change for years; Coco Gauff said flatly that it would lift a real source of stress; Heather Watson admitted she had once timed her birth control to the draw. It was a rare case of the club listening to the people who actually wear the uniform, and it changed nothing a spectator could see.

For all its severity—or perhaps because of it—the white rule has worked as an improbable incubator for the fashion industry. Suzanne Lenglen scandalized the lawns around 1920 in Jean Patou’s pleated skirt and bandeau, bare-armed and daringly short, the first time couture and competitive tennis ever shared a court. René Lacoste stitched a crocodile onto his shirt and built an entire house on the motif. Fred Perry took three consecutive Championships in the mid-1930s and spun the club’s own laurel into a logo that outlived his playing days by half a century. Since 2006, Ralph Lauren has dressed the umpires, line judges and ball boys (the first designer in the tournament’s history to hold the contract); Lauren reportedly wanted the officials in white and was overruled on the grounds that they would upstage the players. And the most cherished looks of the modern game all worked within the cage rather than against it—Roger Federer’s cream cable-knit cardigan in 2008, its buttons hand-turned to mark five straight titles, and the gold-embroidered blazer of 2009, the wardrobe of a man dressing for a coronation he fully intended to award himself.

This is the strange bargain the All England Club struck 150 years ago, very likely without meaning to. The hedges stay clipped, the linens stay white, and anyone who hopes to be remembered has to be sharper than the rule built to contain them. A narrow palette, it turns out, is the most demanding thing you can hand a designer. And the club that polices a fraction of an inch of trim still crowns its winners by hand—the Princess of Wales, its patron, comes down from the Royal Box each July to present the trophies, the last formal flourish in a fortnight built on them.