All White, All Wrong?

There are a few memories I will take to my grave. The summer of 1997, my parents took us to Wimbledon. I watched tennis, ate strawberries and cream, and somehow ended up with both Steve Martin's and Kimberly Williams-Paisley's autographs on the same afternoon. Father of the Bride had come out five years earlier and I was beside myself. It remains one of my favorite days on the planet. 

I've been a Wimbledon devotee ever since, which is why I feel qualified to tell you that the most famous dress code in sports history was invented so that aristocratic women wouldn't visibly sweat in front of other aristocratic people. And until four years ago, it required female players to wear white underwear during their periods. Tradition!

A Brief, Unhinged History of Tennis Whites

The all-white rule traces back to the first Wimbledon Championship in 1877, when tennis was a genteel leisure activity for the Victorian upper class. White clothing was considered more breathable, more proper, and crucially, better at concealing perspiration, which was at the time considered deeply inappropriate, particularly for women. The rule also served a subtler social function: it visually distinguished tennis players from the working class laborers who, presumably, were allowed to sweat.

It wasn't officially codified until 1963, and tightened further in 1993. Today the rules are so strict that colored trims cannot exceed one centimeter, off-white and cream are explicitly banned, and officials have been known to produce tape measures on court to check. In 2014, organizers reportedly checked players' underlayers in locker rooms before they stepped onto the grass.

The dress code relaxed exactly once, in 2022, when the board voted unanimously to allow female players to wear dark undershorts beneath their skirts.Since 1877! Better late than never? 

What All That White Actually Costs

Most tennis apparel, white or otherwise, is made from synthetic fabrics, primarily polyester, which sheds microplastics with every wash and takes hundreds of years to break down. The all-white rule means players go through multiple shorts or shirts per match. For the record, this doesn’t qualify on the top 1000 list of things that keep me up at night, but I do look forward to a time when we don’t have to worry about tennis athletes wearing outfits made of petroleum. Stella McCartney designed a Wimbledon collection using materials collected from beaches and upcycled into yarn, combined with fibers from recycled garments, with a dyeing process that uses 10 fewer liters of water per garment. It's the kind of innovation that makes you wonder why it's the exception rather than the standard.

Balls

While we're on the subject of gear that quietly sheds plastic, consider the tennis ball. Wimbledon's official Slazenger ball travels something like 50,000 miles before anyone serves it, with the wool for its felt going from New Zealand to England to be woven and then on to the Philippines for assembly. One researcher called it one of the longest journeys he'd ever seen for a product. That felt, mostly synthetic, releases microplastics every time it meets a racket or the grass, and the rubber core can take 400 years to break down. Over 300 million balls are produced globally each year and less than 1% get recycled, which for a long time was partly because nobody had cracked how to separate the felt from the rubber. That's finally changing. A Vermont nonprofit built a machine that strips off 99% of the felt, and a European company called Renewaball now makes a fully circular ball with biodegradable wool felt and no microplastics. None of which Wimbledon uses yet. Tradition!

The Grass, The Berries, and The Evian Situation

Maintaining those immaculate grass courts requires an estimated 38 million liters of water across the tournament. To their credit, Wimbledon now harvests rainwater for irrigation through a sustainable drainage system, which is a genuinely good use of the fact that it rains constantly in London in July.

The strawberries, all 160,000 daily portions of them, now come in packaging made from seaweed rather than plastic. This matters more than it sounds: heated plastic packaging leaches microplastics directly into food, and strawberries sitting in the summer sun were a particularly good delivery mechanism for exactly that. Seaweed packaging eliminates both the plastic waste and the microplastic ingestion in one move.

And then there's the Evian situation. Wimbledon's official water sponsor is, and has been for years, a single-use plastic bottle brand. Their solution to this awkward partnership was to install refillable Evian stations across the grounds, eliminating over 100,000 plastic bottles per tournament. Which is genuinely good! But also raises the question of why it took a sustainability push to stop handing out plastic bottles at a two-week event in the first place.

Wimbledon's overall carbon footprint currently sits at about 35,900 tonnes of CO2, roughly equivalent to burning through 4 million gallons of gasoline, with a net-zero target by 2030. The tournament now runs on 100% renewable electricity, sends zero waste to landfill, and composts nearly all kitchen waste into fertilizer or biogas.

What You Can Do With This Information

If it nudges you toward anything practical: when you're shopping for summer activewear, look for brands using recycled materials rather than virgin polyester, and wash synthetic fabrics in a microplastic-catching laundry bag. The washing machine is where most of the damage happens.

If you’re lucky enough to travel to Wimbledon, offset your travel, and say hi to Steve and Kimberly for me. 

And if you're in the market for a summer white outfit that isn't made from plastic, stay tuned, because in a few weeks we're going into the somewhat surprising history of why American linen disappeared, and what that has to do with your closet today.