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The Most Memorable On-Court Style Moments in Wimbledon History

The All England Club insists on white, but the tournament’s best-dressed players have turned that narrow dress code into some of the sport’s most lasting style moments.

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........

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