A brief history of the Fred Perry polo shirt and its complicated connections to hate groups

This week, clothing brand Fred Perry announced the withdrawal of one of its polo shirts from sale in North America. The decision was made after the particular style became associated with a US neo-fascist organisation.

The black polo shirt, featuring a yellow trim on the collar and sleeves and matching laurel wreath logo have been adopted by many members of the Proud Boys, an organisation that was classified as an extremist group by the FBI in 2018. 

The Proud Boys is a far-right group that admits only men as members, they are known to promote and engage in political violence at rallies across North America.

In a statement on the Fred Perry website, the brand expressed its frustration about the style’s adoption hate group, insisting it “does not support and is in no way affiliated with the Proud Boys”.

They wrote “It is incredibly frustrating that this group has appropriated our black/yellow/yellow twin tipped shirt and subverted our laurel wreath to their own ends,” the company said.

“The Fred Perry shirt is a piece of British subcultural uniform, adopted by various groups of people who recognise their own values in what it stands for.”

This is not the first time that the brand’s polo shirts have been adopted by groups representing divisive values that are world’s apart from the history upon which the label was founded.

Fred Perry was a self-taught British championship-winning tennis player who won three consecutive Wimbledon Championships from 1934 to 1936.

In 1935, aged 26, he shot to fame after winning a ‘career grand slam’, taking all four major singles titles. He remains the only player to ever achieve this.

Perry was the son of a cotton spinner and his background was considered unconventional for a tennis player, meaning he was often overlooked by tennis authorities. In 1984 a statue was made in his likeness at Wimbledon.

After launching the first sweatband with ex-Austrian football player in the 1940s, the Fred Perry polo shirt was born in 1952 as the next addition to the eponymous line. It launched at Wimbledon and was an instant success after it was seen on Perry.

The original was made in Leicester and consisted of just one colour with no stripes. It featured the now iconic laurel leaf logo in a nod to the original Wimbledon symbol.

More colours were launched later in the 1950s in response to the success of the initial white version.

The shirt has become synonymous not just with tennis players and other sportsmen, but also with musicians - in particular the late Amy Winehouse - and British subcultures through the years.

In the mid 1960s, Fred Perry was tapped up by young working class men in London as a brand favoured for its smart aesthetic at affordable price tags. Fans of ska, rocksteady, and rude boy style music, which was introduced to them by first-generation Jamaican and Barbadian Brits, carved out a distinctive look which fused available items with influence from the style of their West Indian neighbours.

Boots and tight jeans were paired with Fred Perry shirts as a subversive take on upper class dress codes and mod culture. The boys called themselves hard mods, with the term skinhead adopted later in the 1960s, referring to the boys’ often closely-cropped hair.

The movement and aesthetic migrated North and the Fred Perry shirts became a style adopted by many football fans with colour options allowing for further expression within this uniform look.

As many of the boys who identified as skinheads lived in majority white suburban towns, some were recruited by the fast-growing white nationalist party, which was founded in 1967. It meant that the origins of the hard mod look and its roots in multiculturalism are often forgotten and instead wrongly ascribed to this iteration of the group.

The presence of skinheads remained strong in the 1970s after Margaret Thatcher was elected and their activity became more publicly reported, as some rallied at neo-Nazi events across England.

Later in the 1980s, the uniform was also adopted by similar groups in the US in response to Ronald Reagen’s election.

The polos have remained a uniform item for white supremacist groups and neo-Nazi collectives, and more recently for alt-right groups like the Proud Boys.

The group’s leader has instructed the group’s several hundred members to wear a black and yellow Fred Perry shirt in blogs dating as far back as 2014, according to The Outline.

Despite the brand’s unwelcome associations, their link to music history and subversion in 1960s London has also made them a staple with many famous musicians, especially during the 1990s by bands influenced by ska music. Everyone from Amy Winehouse, to Gwen Stefani and her band No Doubt, to The Ordinary Boy’s Preston were photographed wearing them on stage.

Arctic Monkeys Alex Turner is still regularly seen wearing the brand’s range and his Last Shadow Puppets bandmate Miles Kane was an ambassador for the brand last year.