Country Club Style: Tennis

Country Club Style: Tennis

Walk it back to 1882. A group of well-off Boston men bought roughly 100 acres in Brookline, Massachusetts, and founded The Country Club, the first of its kind in America. They wanted horses and lawns and privacy, a place for wives and children too, unlike the men-only city clubs downtown. Membership was by invitation only. Within a generation the model spread across the country and hardened into a status symbol: the manicured lawn, the clapboard clubhouse, the sport played in spotless white.

That white is the second thread of this whole story. Tennis players wore all white because Victorian tradition demanded it. Sweat stains were considered vulgar, especially on women, and white hid perspiration better than color. White was also expensive to keep clean, which made it a quiet flex before anyone had that word. Wimbledon, first played in 1877, codified the look and never let it go. To this day the All England Club enforces an almost entirely white dress code, the last true bastion of proper tennis fashion left standing in the world.

The garments came fast after that. In 1926, René Lacoste, the French champion nicknamed the Crocodile, ditched the stiff long sleeved button down and designed a short sleeved, breathable piqué cotton shirt. He put a crocodile on the chest. In 1933 he co-founded La Chemise Lacoste and sold it to the public, and the polo shirt was born. Fred Perry followed in 1952 with his laurel wreath logo. The cable knit tennis sweater, the pleated skirt, the club blazer with piping: each one has a story, and every single one of them is back this decade, standing on your feed like it never left.

Lawns, Money, & the Invention of Outdoors as Luxury

The Country Club at Brookline opened in 1882 on land the founders bought specifically to ride horses away from the gambling culture of public racetracks. It was, by most accounts, the first club of its kind in the United States, built for people who could already afford summer retreats and were starting to build year round suburban estates. Golf came a little later, a six hole layout in the early 1890s, and in 1894 the club became one of five charter members of what eventually became the United States Golf Association.

What matters here for fashion is what the club actually represented. It made leisure into a landscape and exclusivity into an address. Tennis fit the picture perfectly. Lawn tennis was one of the only sports men and women could play together in public, which made the court a genuinely social space, a place where flirting was common and being seen mattered as much as the score. The country club codified a look before anyone thought to name it: crisp, pale, unhurried, and expensive to maintain in exactly the way that mattered.

Meanwhile competitive American tennis was being born a few miles down the coast. On August 31, 1881, the first U.S. National Lawn Tennis Championship was contested at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island, a Stanford White designed pleasure palace built by newspaper heir James Gordon Bennett in 1880. A Bostonian named Dick Sears won the first seven titles outright. That tournament eventually grew up and moved to New York, where the world now calls it the US Open. The Newport Casino still stands today as the home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Why Tennis Is White: Sweat, Status, & Wimbledon's Holdout

The all white rule is Victorian to its bones. The dress code dates back to the late Victorian era of the 1870s, when appearing incredibly proper mattered above nearly everything else on a public lawn. White minimized the appearance of sweat, considered deeply improper at the time, and it signaled the leisure required to keep clothing genuinely pristine, since anyone doing real physical labor could never manage it.

Wimbledon still enforces the rule with almost comic rigor. Attire must be almost entirely white, not off white, not cream, with a single trim no wider than one centimeter permitted anywhere on the body. The rule applies from the moment a player enters the court and covers everything down to undergarments, caps, socks, and shoes. Players have rebelled plenty of times over the decades. Andre Agassi skipped Wimbledon entirely from 1988 to 1990 over the dress code. Roger Federer was once asked to change his orange soled shoes mid-tournament. In 2022, in a rare and genuinely humane update, Wimbledon began allowing women to wear dark undershorts underneath their whites. Tradition, meet biology, several centuries late.

René Lacoste & the Shirt That Ate the World

Here is the origin myth, and it is a genuinely good one. René Lacoste won seven Grand Slam titles across the 1920s. The American press dubbed him the Crocodile, reportedly after a bet over a crocodile skin suitcase, and he leaned into it hard, asking a friend to embroider a crocodile directly onto his blazer. Around 1926 he decided the era's standard tennis kit, long sleeves, a tie, full trousers, was simply miserable to actually play in. So he designed a white, short sleeved shirt of loosely knit piqué cotton, with a soft flat collar, a buttoned placket, and a slightly longer tail in back to stay tucked during play. He wore it at the 1926 U.S. Open. He won.

In 1933 he partnered with a knitwear manufacturer and founded La Chemise Lacoste, producing the shirt at real scale under the name L.12.12, a code for piqué cotton, short sleeves, and the twelfth prototype he had tried. Lacoste is widely credited as the first brand to put a logo on the outside of a garment rather than hiding it inside a collar. The style migrated to America partly through Brooks Brothers, whose founder had spotted polo players wearing something similar in England, which is the entire reason we call it a polo shirt to this day, despite its actual birth on a tennis court.

Fred Perry, the Laurel Wreath, & the Cricket Sweater

Fred Perry, the three time Wimbledon champion, launched his own brand in 1952. It began, oddly enough, with a sweatband, and eventually arrived at the piqué polo with a laurel wreath logo modeled directly on the Wimbledon emblem itself. The wreath, a classic symbol of victory, has since been stitched into subcultural history from mod culture straight through to punk, a strange and wonderful second life for a tennis logo.

The cable knit tennis sweater, often called the cricket sweater, traces back to the 1920s as well. It is typically cream or white wool, V necked, cabled across the chest, and trimmed with narrow bands of color at the neck and cuffs, originally in specific team or club colors. The V neck version became the dominant style on golf courses by the late 1920s, popularized in part by British royalty, and the very same garment served tennis, cricket, and squash players equally well. Drape it over the shoulders, sleeves crossed loosely at the front, and you have the single most efficient visual shorthand for country club that exists anywhere in fashion.

For that exact silhouette, San Martini's Sweater Weather collection carries fine gauge knits built for precisely this kind of shoulder drape, warm enough for a cool clubhouse evening and light enough to survive an afternoon in the sun without ever coming off.

Suzanne Lenglen, Pleats, & the Birth of the Tennis Skirt

Before there was a tennis skirt worth naming, women played the entire sport in ankle length dresses that would strike anyone today as borderline impossible to move in. Then came Suzanne Lenglen. In 1921 the French champion walked onto the Wimbledon grass in a custom ensemble: a white, pleated, knee length silk skirt, a sleeveless cardigan, and a vibrant orange headband knotted at the temple. The skirt length alone was genuinely scandalous at the time, given that skirts in general did not rise to the knee anywhere in fashion until 1924. She bared her arms. She swapped a formal hat for a simple bandeau. In doing so she helped invent sportswear as its own real category, and made the suntan itself fashionable along the way.

Ted Tinling & Gorgeous Gussie

Fast forward to 1949, and the most delicious scandal in the entire history of tennis fashion. American player Gertrude Gussie Moran asked designer Ted Tinling to make her something special for Wimbledon. She had not packed the right undergarments to go with his short dress design, so Tinling and an assistant improvised lace trimmed panties from the very same fabric the night before. When Moran took the court and the crowd caught a glimpse of lace beneath her flying skirt mid-rally, there was an actual uproar in the stands. Photographers reportedly lay flat on the ground to shoot up at her legs. The British press instantly christened her Gorgeous Gussie. The All England Club accused Tinling of bringing vulgarity and sin into tennis, and though he had served as an official Wimbledon host for many years prior, he was frozen out of the tournament entirely for the next 33 years. All of that, for two inches of visible lace.

Ralph Lauren Bottles the Whole Thing

Ralph Lauren, born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, did not invent country club style. He packaged it with genius precision and sold it back to the entire country. He launched Polo in the late 1960s, and in 1972 introduced the short sleeved shirt with the embroidered polo pony that would go on to become one of the most recognized logos on earth. He designed the menswear for the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which only deepened the association between his clothes and old money glamour. As the preppy wave crested through the late 1970s and early 1980s, Polo Ralph Lauren became the uniform, both on campus and well beyond it. Lauren's real genius was blending Ivy League sophistication and country club elegance directly into everyday, wearable clothing. He took a pure aspiration and turned it into an actual, purchasable wardrobe.

Then in 1980 came The Official Preppy Handbook, edited by Lisa Birnbach. It was satire, a tongue in cheek field guide to WASP America that included a chapter literally titled The Country Club Years. It was so accurate in describing the world it was mocking that people genuinely started using it as an instruction manual instead of a joke. It sold in the millions and helped fuel the rise of J. Crew and L.L. Bean into full-blown cultural institutions.

The Revival: What Is Tenniscore, & Why Now

Now the modern chapter, the one your feed already knows about even if it does not have a name for it yet. Tenniscore is a fashion microtrend that emerged in the early 2020s, popularized on TikTok roughly between 2022 and 2024. It fuses classic tennis attire, pleated skirts, polos, tennis dresses, cable knit vests, with modern athleisure and a heavy, unmistakable dose of old money aesthetic. Interest in the actual sport of tennis spiked hard during pandemic lockdowns, when it offered one of the only genuinely safe outdoor social activities available, and the clothes followed the players home from the court.

Three forces converged to turn this into a real moment rather than a passing fad. First, quiet luxury and the old money aesthetic. In 2023, driven by a certain prestige television drama, a viral courtroom wardrobe, and a much-discussed film about inherited wealth, TikTok fell hard for logo-free, muted, timeless wealth signaling. Tennis whites are, in effect, that entire aesthetic expressed in purely athletic form. Second, Miuccia Prada. Her Miu Miu Fall 2022 collection sent out low slung, pleated micro skirts paired with cropped polo tops that immediately took over the internet and appeared, within weeks, on every woman at brunch who had never once held a tennis racket in her life. Third, and by far the biggest, came a single film.

Zendaya's 2024 film Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino, is a steamy tennis love triangle, and its costumes were designed by a major fashion house creative director working outside the studio system entirely. The film grossed just over 94 million dollars worldwide against a 55 million dollar budget, becoming the director's highest grossing film to date. Its influence on fashion was immediate and genuinely measurable in hard retail data. On her press tour Zendaya wore custom looks paired with tennis ball detailed pumps, and she later described keeping actual tennis balls tucked into her shoes for the photographs. Industry trend trackers noted the influence of tenniscore and destination dressing showing up directly in their quarterly indexes that same year, with one major house topping the rankings on a huge jump in search interest driven partly by dressing Zendaya for that exact press tour. A second brand saw searches jump sixty four percent in the same quarter, driven by its own retro tennis inspired collection.

The runways kept serving after that. Lacoste returned to the Paris Fashion Week runway in March 2024 under a new design director, with a Fall/Winter collection that went straight back to the brand's 1920s tennis roots and René Lacoste's own Davis Cup triumph decades earlier. Multiple contemporary labels collaborated directly with heritage tennis brands on limited capsule collections. Gucci folded tennis pieces into a major sportswear collaboration. One design house's creative director has long treated tennis whites as genuine high fashion rather than sport-adjacent basics.

The Garments Today, & How to Wear Them

The polo shirt remains the anchor of the entire look, and it earns that position honestly. It has been called the most democratic garment in fashion, equally at home on a court, a clubhouse porch, or a Tuesday commute. Buy it in real piqué cotton, in white or navy, and wear the collar down unless you have fully committed to a 1980s revival.

The pleated tennis skirt and the skort have escaped the court entirely at this point, worn now with everything from cropped sweaters to oversized hoodies in a deliberate mix of formal and casual. San Martini's French Riviera collection carries exactly this kind of crisp, coastal white and navy piece, built to move easily from a clubhouse lunch to a seaside walk without ever feeling like a costume.

The cable knit sweater worn over the shoulders is pure Slim Aarons shorthand, instantly recognizable and endlessly flattering. The cricket sweater with colored tipping at the V neck is its cozier, more collegiate cousin, and it layers beautifully over a crisp collared shirt from San Martini's Back to the Office collection, which carries the exact kind of structured, tailored knits that translate this whole aesthetic into a genuine workday wardrobe.

The palette throughout is disciplined and unforgiving of mistakes: white above everything else, then navy, then a deep forest green, with occasional cream and the odd racing stripe thrown in for texture. Keep the palette tight and the entire look reads considerably more expensive than it actually costs.

Accessories close the whole story out. The visor and the headband both carry deep, real tennis roots. Suzanne Lenglen's tulle bandeau was the first great tennis headband in history, and American player Helen Wills popularized the early visor throughout the 1930s. Both are back in full force today, updated by contemporary houses but instantly recognizable to anyone who has looked at a Slim Aarons print. San Martini's Hats collection covers this exact register, whether the moment calls for a structured visor or something softer for an evening on the terrace.

And then there is the tennis bracelet, quietly one of the most brilliant pieces of accidental branding in jewelry history. It was simply called a diamond line bracelet until 1978, when at the U.S. Open the clasp on Chris Evert's diamond bracelet broke mid-match. She asked officials to pause play so she could search the court and find it. The name stuck permanently from that single moment onward, and it remains the quiet luxury jewelry move that ties the entire country club silhouette together, working just as well off the court as it ever did on it.

Building the Look

Start with one honest piece. Buy a white piqué polo from a brand that makes it for tennis, and wear it until it genuinely softens with use. That single piece is your foundation, and it costs considerably less than most designer basics on the market today.

Add the skirt or the shorts next, choosing white or navy, and pair it deliberately with something that has nothing to do with tennis at all, a chunky sweater or a well worn tee. The tension between formal and casual is the entire point of the modern version of this look.

Layer the knitwear over top. A cream cable knit sweater with navy and red tipping, draped loosely over the shoulders, is the single fastest way to signal country club without ever holding a club membership. Keep the palette locked to white, navy, and forest green throughout and the whole outfit will hold together instinctively.

Finish with jewelry rather than logos. A thin tennis bracelet is the quiet luxury move that ties the entire story together in one small gesture, and it works exactly as well at dinner as it ever did on a Saturday morning court. Skip anything with a large visible logo entirely, which runs directly counter to the whole old money philosophy this aesthetic is actually built on.

The clothes were never really about the sport. They were about the version of a life the sport suggested: unhurried, sun warmed, and dressed for a lawn that somebody else was paid to keep perfect. A century later, the clothes remember that even when we have forgotten it ourselves.

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