In 1877 women weren’t keen on showing off colored underwear (we don’t think colored underwear was even a thing then), instead opting for full-length dresses. Now skivvies are all the rage at the All England Club in London. And that’s perfectly fine, under the 136-year-old rulebook. But solid-colored soles on your shoes? Yeah, that’s a big-time no-no.
So while Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, Alize Cornet and a host of other ladies donned short skirts and dresses at this year’s Wimbledon before losing, routinely flying up to offer plenty of signature Nike orange or red undergarments without so much as a glance from officials (well, not for rules violations, anyway), Roger Federer, a seven-time champion at Wimbledon, was asked to change his shoes before promptly falling in the second round of the tourney. With all this losing, it’s time to talk underwear.
Offensive gets defined differently, especially when there’s no accounting for underwear in 1877.
Sure, we all know about Wimbledon’s all-white apparel rule. And, yeah, maybe Nike was purposely pushing boundaries to put Federer in offending shoes (twice already I’ve written Nike—there I did it again—in this space alone, a post that wouldn’t have been offered up without a rules violation and therefore garnering the Oregon footwear giant less attention) or maybe it was an honest mistake, thinking the bottom of a pair of shoes was an okay place to toss a block of color. Wrong, even if a cursory reading of the rules may side with Federer’s designer, Tinker Hatfield.
As Wimbledon’s “guidelines regarding prominently white clothing rule” instruct, there simply can’t be a solid mass of color, must be little or no dark colors, certainly no fluorescent colors and Wimbledon always has a preference for shirts, shorts and skirts to remain totally white. But when it talks about shoes, it gets a little dicey, saying instead that they want “shoe uppers [to] be predominately white,” not mentioning the soles of the shoes. I see the loophole there too, Tinker. Wimbledon, though, sees the “no solid mass of coloring” rule applying instead.
But as far as those brightly colored derrieres? Yeah, that wasn’t an issue in 1877, so don’t expect those to pop up in any guidelines or rulebooks, at least not at the All England Club.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping your grass-filled courts traditional, full of classic white clothing. White pairs nicely with green, does it not? But now that color is such a part of our culture—especially a money-seeking, attention-grabbing apparel culture—Wimbledon needs to refine those 136-year-old rules. They’re going to need to add in special clauses for shoe soles and even maybe even shoe laces. And they’re going to need to do something about all that underwear. Because the only apparel color we see at Wimbledon sits squarely on the backside of the female players. 1877 just had no idea what was coming.
