Fred Perry: do sportswear ao streetwear

Fred Perry:from sportswear to streetwear

Talking about Fred Perry is talking about fashion, but also about sport, music, elites or different moments in its history that intersect with British history and subcultures. More than that, they both seem to be intrinsically linked and"feed"each other.


The beginning

Born in 1909 to a working class family in Stockport, Manchester, Frederick John Perry became world champion in table tennis at the age of 19, before switching to tennis and winning the Wimbledon tournament three times in a row and three times (two consecutive) the US Open.

Bold, irreverent, Fred Perry, a true self made man, leaps from the British middle class to the other side of the ocean to move on the Hollywood circuit, overcoming not only geographical but social barriers.

But the biggest change would come only later, when an injury led him to seek luck in other fields and to join the Austrian Tibby Wegner:first through the creation of the sweatband as we know it today, then through development of a white piqué sports polo, with short sleeves and buttons at the front.

Launched at Wimbledon in 1952, the polo is an immediate success:Fred Perry was born.


Music, counterculture and the mod movement

Strongly rooted in the counterculture of the 50s, it is at the end of this decade that the brand knows its maximum exponent and guarantees, most likely, the place it occupies until today.

It is at this time that the mod movement that would take on the Fred Perry polo emerges as a kind of uniform, taking it out of the exclusive sphere of elite sport for the streets, from sportswear to casual and streetwear.

And so it would also be in the 60s and 70s when other subcultures continued to use the iconic piece as a distinctive and unifying symbol - such as casuals (of which we speak here ), skinheads, northern soul or rude boys.

There are already more than six decades of history and proximity to music and counterculture, so well portrayed in the documentary that Fred Perry would “commission” British director and musician Don Letts:a six-episode series entitled “Six decades of subculture ”.

La La Land and Fred Perry

Purchased in 1995 by Hit Union, the brand's Japanese distributor, Fred Perry is currently one of the must-have names in streetwear. Its pole and its laurel wreath are recognized anywhere in the world, whether “across the room, on the dance floor, or in a football stadium”.

But it was not always like that and in your La La Land there are already 14 years of work with the brand, a time in which it had to assert itself as a world chess piece in casualwear. Collection after collection, there are many Fred Perry options that we bring to you. Take a look here !

Back to blog