The complicated history of the Fred Perry polo shirt A symbol of all countercultures, first left and then right

In 2020 everything is political, even clothes. Recently, for example, Fred Perry had to withdraw a black and yellow polo shirt from the North American market because it had become the unofficial uniform of the Proud Boys, a radical alt-right group also mentioned by Donald Trump in his last presidential debate with Joe Biden. The removal of polo from the market is perhaps the brand's first move to redefine the culture surrounding its polo - a common item in itself but on which layers of political meanings have accumulated over the years, first left and then right. 

Le origini

In the 1960s, in England, the children of immigrants from Jamaica and Barbados, who came to Europe after World War II, introduced musical genres such as ska and rocksteady among the young people of the English working class, and the aesthetics that became known as that of the rude boys. Influenced by American jazz culture, the rude boys of Jamaica dressed in tailoring suits, micro-ties and felt hats. Don Letts, director of the documentary The Story of Skinhead recalls those years: 

«You could see the music was bringing these different cultures together […]. Politics wasn’t really something that we talked about. […]They went for things that were associated with the English upper class and looked clean and sharp but were more affordable, and Fred Perry was definitely one of those things».

Members of the alt-right prefer to reconnect with the social anger of 1960s skinheads to say they are going against the system - without obviously realizing that they are cultivating retrograde, conservative rather than progressive values. Each of these groups feels the need to create a sense of internal cohesion that is developed through rituals (beating and getting beaten, swearing, demonstrations) and through a uniform, Fred Perry's yellow and black polo shirt. A type of unofficial cultural twinning to which the brand has given in recent days a strong and decisive cut withdrawing from the market from the pole. A noble move by Fred Perry that will help to give visibility to the movement – whose members could now react by further reinforcing the cultural and ideological imagination of which the Fred Perry pole has been forcibly cloaked.