While City executives squirm in the boardroom and have to be bailed out by the treasury, it’s the chavvy, lowly, hoodie and his chippy ladette girlfriend who might possess the superpower that saves retail spending.
Virtually everybody, except a few oil sheiks and barons, is watching their spending and counting their pennies and cents, spending has dropped like a stone down a well, in virtually every area … except one.
J D Sport, oneof the retailer that dresses our teen generation has just reported a 54% RISE in their half-year pre-tax profits. Similar spending is expected to show in other teen havens like H&M and topshop, and across the sporting clothing chains generally.
It seems that 16-19 year olds know what they want: quality sportswear and casual clothing and are still willing to pay for it.Hurrah for the hoodie, whose front pocket might still be deep enough to save the high street from a recession!
There’s been a scandal about pictures taken of Prince Harry playing polo which were blown up and used by polo and sportswear brand Hackett as part of an advertising campaign. The posters of the Prince were fifteen feet tall and were displayed at the Soto Grande Polo tournament in Spain.
The Hackett brand is a sponsor of the polo tournament, but the posters didn’t mention this, seeming instead to imply that Prince Harry was endorsing the brand’s clothing line. There’s no information yet as to whether Hackett intends to use the picture which shows a moody looking Harry, hands on hips, in a dramatically lit moment, in magazine or billboard advertising.
The Palace has made a strongly worded statement saying that posing for snaps with a sponsor is one thing but ending up ‘on a socking great advert’ is something else. Harry’s Clarence House office also confirmed that the Prince has not been consulted about the use of the image and would not have given his consent.
Bernard (sometimes spelt Bernhard) Gant arrived in New York in 1914, as an immigrant from the Ukraine. His first job, as with so many immigrant men, was working in the garment industry as a collar-sewing specialist in a Manhattan factory. Within a couple of years he’d met the woman who was to become his wife: she was a button and buttonhole specialist who worked for the same company.
As he progressed from factory hand to entrepreneur Bernard Gant sold ‘fine’ shirts to private labels in America, including Manhattan Shirts, J. Press and Brooks Brothers and his sons came into the business in the 1940s to help.While they consistently sold to other companies, their shirts always bore a small red ‘G’ embroidered in an unobtrusive spot.
Their ‘preppy’ shirts became fashion must haves on university campuses across the USA in the late fifties and early sixties – worn with the collar undone and no tie, and even with the top button undone unless formal events were being attended.The Gant style included a shirt-front that buttoned down a double-truck hem, and the distinctive Gant loop at the top of the back pleat which was used for hanging up the shirt when changing for athletic events – this was the key feature that made the shirt a success – as sportsmen and their adoring fans found the loop useful, it became a fashion icon. At one point in the 1960s, Gant was the second-largest shirt maker in the world but the family sold the business in 1967 and it has changed hands several times since then – to day it is owned Pyramid Sportswear of Sweden.
Gant has avoided some of the negative connotations that have struck other brands that appeal to young men, such as Fred Perry’s right-wing fan club of skinheads, but has been associated with homosexuals who are attracted to sportsmen in the lyrics of some rock songs.
The Gant style is roomy, often even blousey, and the collars whether hard or soft, have a ‘roll’ – formal shirts have a back pleat and both formal and polo-shirts have the signature hanging loop.Gant polo-shirt collars are often a little wider and flatter lying than other brands; being noticeably more difficult to ‘pop’ or stand up than most.
There’s as much talk at Wimbledon about the fashion as the forehand smash. For the sports clothing and casual-wear designers, this is a testing ground for summer hits – one has already emerged: Roger Federer’s white cardigan with the F monogram was much commented on (not always politely) and is turning up in sports stores right now even though he didn’t win the final.Serena Williams didn’t fare so well in her white warm-up trench coat: it was pretty universally derided as a fashion faux pas and isn’t likely to become this year’s High street fashion hit.Maria Sharapova somewhat see-through bib top and shorts was popular with men, but her opponent Alla Kudryavtseva said after beating her, ‘… I don’t like her outfit. …It was one of my motivations to beat her.’
Venus Williams wore her own design, although the way she kept pulling at the top suggests it wasn’t entirely a tennis-designed garment.It appears in her clothing collection so we can expect to see plenty of those plaited front dresses on the beaches this year. The fascination of Wimbledon is its constraints - dress whites are still de rigueur and any woman wearing a low-cut top can be removed from the court. This means that the sportswear has to work within the confines of the rules and that makes for subtle alterations to sportswear that fast fashion outlets watch hungrily to be sure they don’t miss this year’s big hit.
As Andy Murray bows out, Wimbledon will be counting the profits. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, which is responsible for staging the internationally famous tennis tournament, is actually a private club founded in 1868 as The All England Croquet Club. In 1875 lawn tennis, which was a game that had been introduced by Major Clopton Wingfield a year earlier and at that time was known as Sphairistike, (not quite so catchy, was it?) was added to the activities of the club.It was such a hit that in 1877 the Club was re-titled The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club and instituted the first Lawn Tennis Championship. A new code of laws was drawn up. So comprehensive were they that there are virtually no changes in today’s rules except for details such as the height of the net and posts and the distance of the service line from the net.
And the Wimbledon shop (properly called the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club shop) has a lucrative franchise - this year’s polo-shirts are a sweltering £30 each, but vintage Wimbledon polo-shirts are also selling on eBay so you might get a bargain if you’re lucky.
Yogi Berra, the superstar player and manager of baseball, has been sharing his views on teams and their appearance, but his views go further than sporting achievements.Here’s what he had to say:
…you have a responsibility to those wearing the same uniform. Break a rule or do something foolhardy, you embarrass the uniform. You embarrass yourself and your team. Wearing a uniform — whether you’re a cop or a coffee shop waitress — carries a responsibility and dependability. To those one serves and those wearing the same uniform.
When I played in the minors, we wore hand-me-down Yankee uniforms. I don’t know whose old woollen jersey I wore, but Charlie Silvera was always thrilled that he wore Lou Gehrig’s old trousers.Nowadays, nobody wears baggy flannels anymore; there’s no more hand-me-downs. But anyone who puts on a Yankee uniform can’t ignore the history of it all.
Uniforms are more than a fashion statement. They’re a team’s identity. It’s like what Jerry Seinfeld said about fans: They don’t really root for players, they root for a team’s laundry. I still like that the Yankees still don’t put players’ names on their backs. The team’s identity is more important.
And if Yogi Berra says it, it must be true! I don’t think he’d approve of this T-shirt though …
Fred Perry didn’t intend to play tennis, and never expected to become a fashion brand. At eighteen (in 1929) he was a Table Tennis World Champion and took up tennis to give him a break from the sport in which he excelled, but his exceptional speed and mastery of the Continental grip meant he could hit the ball low and on the rise and that made him the first player to win all four Grand Slam singles titles.He was also the last British player to win the Wimbledon men’s singles title in 1934 and winning it again in 1935 and ’36 made him an English icon.
Then, the late 1940s he met Tibby Wegner, an Austrian footballer who had invented an anti-perspirant device worn around the wrist to which Perry made some alterations and which was then marketed as the sweatband. Wegner’s next idea was to produce a sports shirt which was to be made from white knitted cotton pique with short sleeves and buttons: it was launched at Wimbledon in 1952, and what we now know the Fred Perry polo-shirt was an immediate success. The famous laurel logo is stitched into the fabric of the shirt instead of being ironed on like competing brands.
The ‘Fred Perry’ came in white only, until the late sixties when mod culture demanded a wider palette and then it became popular, particularly in Northern England, culminating it its adoption by the ‘Perry Boys, violent football supporters who terrorised Manchester in particular. The brand has also been popular with skinheads in Eastern Europe.
