Why Are Tennis Sneakers Usually White?
Picture a classic tennis player and you probably picture white: a white shirt, white shorts and white shoes. The look is so familiar that it can feel like a rule of the sport. But why did tennis shoes become white in the first place?
The short answer is that the shoes followed the clothing. White became the traditional colour of tennis attire, and footwear completed the look. Today white shoes are a tradition rather than a requirement across most of the sport. Wimbledon is the best-known exception: its dress code still requires players' shoes to be almost entirely white.
We asked Huub van Boeckel, former professional tennis player and founder of HUB Footwear, how it looked from inside the game. He competed in all four Grand Slams and spent part of his career under contract to Adidas for footwear.
Where the white came from
Lawn tennis was not invented from nothing. It descends from real tennis, the older indoor game that is still played today, though on a very small scale.
"Tennis as we know it is lawn tennis, usually played outdoors and these days indoors as well," Huub explains. "It comes from real tennis, which is still played mostly in England, but also in France, the United States and Australia. I think there are only around 55 or 60 courts in the world. In real tennis, white clothing is still mandatory."
That last detail is the interesting one. The older game kept the white requirement that lawn tennis has let go of everywhere except Wimbledon.
The all-white convention in lawn tennis itself hardened for reasons that were entirely Victorian. White was expensive to keep clean, which made it a useful class signal. It reflects sunlight rather than absorbing it. And it shows perspiration far less than coloured fabric, which mattered in an era when visible sweat was considered improper. Cricket whites and the lawn dresses worn at garden parties pushed in the same direction. By 1890 Wimbledon had made it a rule.
Those explanations survive inside the sport as received wisdom, and Huub recognises them.
"In sport, I think white was associated with cleanliness, elegance and good manners," he says. "People also say you see sweat stains less on white. Certainly back when players wore long trousers and long sleeves, there must have been a fair amount of sweating going on."
What a tennis shoe actually was
For most of the twentieth century, a tennis shoe was a canvas shoe with a rubber sole. Nothing more.
"The shoe I remember best is the Adidas Ivan Lendl, around 1985 to 1987," Huub says. "Before that I played in Puma, though I cannot remember which model, and before that Spring Court and the Dunlop Volley. Those were canvas shoes, going back as far as the sixties."
Proper cushioning arrived late. "It was only in the eighties that you saw real development towards tennis shoes with more comfort. Before that they were basically little canvas shoes. Shoes like Vans and Pro-Keds are essentially derived from tennis shoes from the thirties and forties."
Those canvas shoes were white, and for a straightforward reason. "Mainly white, yes. Tennis has always been played in white clothing, so white shoes went with it. It would look a bit odd to wear white tennis kit with bright red shoes."
Clothes changed colour before shoes did
Colour arrived on court earlier than most people assume, and it arrived on the clothing first.
"Arthur Ashe was one of the first players I noticed wearing coloured tennis clothing. That must have been the late sixties," Huub says. "I was a junior in the early seventies, and that is when colour really broke through. You got brands like Ellesse, Fila and Sergio Tacchini. The Italian brands especially brought a lot of colour and beautiful clothing."
The shoes did not follow. "They stayed mainly white for a very long time. The colour only really came with the rise of Andre Agassi and Nike. Early on, Nike made white tennis shoes with a coloured logo. But Agassi wore neon clothing, and those colours came back in his shoes. From that moment on, any colour was possible."
That is the turning point: not the day tennis kit gained colour, but the day the shoe stopped being the one white item left.
Are white shoes required in tennis today?
Usually, no. Players can wear shoes in many colours, depending on the tournament's rules. Wimbledon remains the exception, with clothing rules stating that shoes must be almost entirely white, including soles and laces.
Why white outlasted the court
Away from the court, the white tennis shoe found a second life. The shape was simple, the colour went with everything, and by the time tennis footwear had moved on to EVA midsolescushioning and surface-specific outsoles, the plain white shoe had become a wardrobe staple for people who had never played a set.
Huub thinks that is also why sneakers took over generally. "Sneakers were only just emerging then. The difference was enormous. Leather shoes with leather soles look fantastic, but you have to break them in, sometimes for weeks or months. They wear out faster and they are nowhere near as comfortable."
Where our own shoes come from
When Huub started HUB, he did not set out to make a tennis shoe. He started with one.
"It was purely intuitive, I never consciously thought about it," he says. "I took a tennis sole from the late seventies as the basis and designed a casual upper for it, in brown leather. I did change the sole. The original tennis sole was a lot thicker and I preferred something very thin, so I roughly halved it and adjusted the tread slightly, though it stayed a tennis tread."
One decision from that first pair is still in every shoe we make. "Because that sole was quite thin, I put an almost orthopaedic insole in from the start. It is still in our HUB shoes today. It makes them comfortable, and with those thin soles it also meant you did not immediately feel it underfoot when you stepped on a stone."
So the answer to why tennis shoes are white runs through Victorian lawns, French indoor courts and a canvas Dunlop Volley. The answer to why our shoes look the way they do runs through a tennis sole from the late seventies, cut in half.