British actor Hugh Grant may have fallen asleep in the royal box at Centre Court at Wimbledon on Wednesday, but he did so dressed impeccably.KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images
On Wednesday, cameras caught the actor Hugh Grant appearing to nap in the royal box on Centre Court. He was in the telltale pose – tilted to one side, chin on chest.
It would be embarrassing except for one thing – Grant looked fantastic. He looked the way men once did, but no longer do, while on a day out in public.
He was wearing a blue suit, a white dress shirt that had just come out of the wrapping and a knit tie. It is the outfit of someone who knows he won’t have to walk far on a hot summer day. It is also the uniform of Wimbledon.
This event is remarkable for many reasons, but this is the one that sets it apart from every other sporting event on the planet: It’s got class.
The other grand slams have some class, but nowhere near as much. Dressy at the U.S. Open means wearing a collared T-shirt. Golf means dressing as the players do, including logos covering every square inch of your person.
At Wimbledon, the strawberries and cream deliver
The big four North American sports have encouraged people to don sport- and city-specific fancy dress, like oversized trick-or-treaters. Were you to time warp in someone from 75 years ago, they would assume the crowd at a typical football game is either a not-fit-for-purpose army, or maybe a cult.
In this way, modern sport has managed a historical first – separating wealth from taste.
There’s a lot of talk out there right now about how we have entered a new era of excess. If the social ructions of COVID-19 were the ’70s, welcome to the go-go ’80s.
Between Jeff Bezos’ wedding and Donald Trump’s interior-design sense, our financial betters have moved past their Occupy Wall Street nightmares of getting strung from lampposts and are back to rubbing it in our faces.
But sport has owned that territory this whole time. It’s where the sort of toffs who can afford $3,000 courtside seats show up dressed like they are going to a Wu-Tang Clan listening party. They aren’t wearing clothes. They’re wearing a costume. Usually, one that doesn’t fit.
American-French actor Timothee Chalamet sits courtside prior to the start of Game 5 between the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks in the second round for the 2025 NBA Playoffs at TD Garden.Bob DeChiara/Reuters
They’re jumping around like they’re on the team, desperate for a high five from a player. The point is to get yourself on television. The weirder you look, the better.
Up in the rafters, there is a tendency toward literal uniformity. Everybody is wearing the same team jersey with the same names of the same players on the back. It is an actual herd of humanity.
You don’t want to get all David Hume about it, but what is it about sports fandom and the enthusiastic negation of the self? Why do so many people want to pretend to be someone else?
The other option is to lean into vulgarity, like the guy sitting in front of me a few weeks ago at a hockey game in Florida. He was wearing a Panthers jersey with the number ‘0’ and a nameplate that read ‘F’SGIVEN’.
Even in Florida, the Stanley Cup final is a hard ticket to get hold of. This guy must have a little cash. Again, money untethered from taste.
As always, do whatever floats your boat. Nobody’s getting hurt (unless you’re a Leafs fan).
But it isn’t until you sit in the crowd at Wimbledon that you realize how far we’ve regressed. I’m not talking about loud displays of success, though there is plenty of that. I’m talking about putting yourself together in order to make an appearance.
Only the royal box has a dress code – jacket and tie, yes; hats, no – but it is broadly applied everywhere on Centre Court. There are now only three places in the western world you will see a critical mass of adult men wearing neckties – head offices, weddings and a Wimbledon final.
This is not to say that everyone dresses up, but that those who dress down will feel very American. Their athleisure, no matter how expensive, sets them apart here, and not in a good way.
This manner of dressing ranges from self-consciously dandyish to so rumpled it looks like they have just been pulled from a sack. But broadly speaking, the Wimbledon look for men is a light sport coat, a dress shirt, a tie of some sort and cotton slacks that don’t look like you got them from Amazon. The women’s outfits range from sun dresses and Converse All-Stars to full-on couture and heels. This tendency to come up to the occasion will be most visible this coming weekend.
There are some people who insist on dressing like shlubs, but they rarely feature on the broadcast. This is why Wimbledon’s reputation as the most elegant global sporting event cannot be teased apart from its audience.
Watching Week 1 at Wimbledon doesn’t feel like capital-W Wimbledon, though the players are the same. It’s that you are more likely to see action from the outer courts, where the style book doesn’t apply and the crowd isn’t as nicely put together. Your status-conscious lizard brain picks that up.
For all of us, Wimbledon is Centre Court, and the sense that there is a place where the old rules of etiquette still apply. Where people cheer in the right spots, and aren’t day drunk, and have never even considered turning their ballcap backward.
Twenty years ago, I’d have called it pretentious. But that was when the people in charge hadn’t yet publicly dedicated their lives to remaining 20 years old forever. It was when there was no need for us to invent an oxymoron like quiet luxury.
That’s gone now. Every corner of culture played its role, but sports led the way. It’s where we used to hide our rampaging id, until our id took over again.
This retreat into tackiness isn’t obvious until you find a little corner of the world it hasn’t yet conquered. For that reason alone, Wimbledon must never change.