Look to your laurels: 70 years of the Fred Perry polo shirt

When tennis star Fred Perry launched his polo shirt in the 1950s, it was designed to be worn on court. Little did he think it would become part of British cultural history, yet over the decades it has been worn by everyone from mods to ska fans, fashionistas and pop stars.

“So many people have worn the Fred Perry shirt,” says Dominique Fenn, the company’s brand editor. “Sometimes, when you go to a gig, it’s not just the people on stage wearing it, it’s the roadies, it’s the guy behind the bar, it’s the crowd. In my first couple of weeks at Fred Perry, we did a live gig with the Specials, and, honestly, I felt like I’d joined a cult. It was that bizarre.”

Next month, the laurel wreath-logoed polo shirt celebrates its 70th anniversary with a new exhibition, Fred Perry: A British Icon, at the Design Museum. As the exhibition demonstrates, such popularity is not restricted to Specials gigs – or even to music. “You’re equally likely to see a grime artist wearing it as you are someone into 1960s R&B or indie music, as well as across the football terraces,” says Liza Betts, a lecturer at London College of Fashion, UAL. Betts adds: “It works across generations. My 80-year-old dad wears it, as does my teenage daughter and her friends.”

Simple design belies the shirt’s complex history. “It’s been appropriated and re-appropriated and rejected and appropriated again,” says Betts, “and at each point, its mythology gains more traction. Each generation, it gets taken up by somebody who is a symbol of cool – Paul Weller, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, and it speaks to new people and gets adopted again.”

It wasn’t the first, or only, polo shirt with a cool logo – the French tennis player René Lacoste launched his version in 1933, and the