Clothing the British Olympic doi:10.

1093/jdh/eps017
Journal of Design History

Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Vol. 25 No. 3

Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
The history of sporting clothing has complex inter-connections with the wider
fashioning of modern subjectivities. However, this remains an overlooked aspect
of sports, leisure and fashion historical studies. This essay looks at the relationship
between the constitution of modern Olympic bodies and the allied evolution of new
forms of sporting dress from the late nineteenth century. The historical emergence of
the modern nation state provides a conceptual framework within which to examine

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the formative development of British Olympic ceremonial attire from the inception
of the modern Olympic movement in 1896, through to the opening ceremony of the
Paris Games of 1924. The essay focuses on British male Olympic team members and
interrogates how new forms of sporting ceremonial clothing historically functioned to
fashion a highly politicized discourse of Olympic sporting nationhood.

Keywords: cultural nationalism—national; identity—sporting dress—ceremonial attire—

sporting body ideals— ideology

Introduction
The staging of the London Olympic Games was an integral part of the Franco-British
Exhibition of 1908. A leaflet designed to promote the exhibition’s attractions depicts a
young male athlete dressed in white singlet and short cotton drawers [1]. Amidst wav-
ing flags from various nations, the athlete stands atop a white marble podium raised
high above a crowded White City Stadium. With a laurel wreath at his feet—which
are clad in the latest lightweight athletic shoes—and holding an animal-skin scroll, the
athlete heralds the start of the modern Games surrounded by symbols of ancient and
modern athletic idealism and the emerging pageantry of the modern nation state.

There is a need to examine what is at stake when bodies participate in the spectacular
culture of nationalism and its emergent modern institutions, to which the revival of
the Ancient Games in 1896 was both a response and a stimulus. In 1908, a visual and
textual rhetoric was employed by the British press and other promotional media that
portrayed sport and sporting achievement as a ‘popular national metaphor’ as much
as a symbol of internationalism.1 The figure of the idealized young male athlete con-
figured in leaflets, posters, and popular advertising, as well as in the illustrated press,
was seen to embody a British amateur ethos that was valued for its physical and moral
corrective qualities.

The idealized young British male athletic body was materially fashioned through the
development of Olympic team ceremonial attire. Activity-specific sporting clothing and
© The Author [2012]. Published
team uniforms evolved in the nineteenth century, in relation to the progressive cat- by Oxford University Press on
egorization and regulation of professional and amateur sporting bodies in Britain. This behalf of The Design History
shaped a British athletic ideal that then took on a highly-charged cultural potency Society. All rights reserved.

252
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Fig 1.  Olympic Games in the
Great Stadium. Front cover,
leaflet promoting Olympic
Games in the Great Stadium of
White City at the Franco-British
Exhibition, London, 1908 (artist
unknown). Reproduced with
permission from the Museum of
London

in the new arena of international Olympic sporting competition. Olympic ceremonial

clothing assumed a central place in the mythologizing of specific national attributes;
and clothing symbolically functioned to negotiate the inherent tensions that existed
between universal Olympic idealism and the essentially self-serving ideological drive of
nationalist ambition.

The 1908 London Games marked a new chapter in sporting and Olympic history. Fol-
lowing a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in the Hague in 1907,

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
253
rules governing Olympic participation were introduced that allowed individuals to
compete only through an affiliation, whether by birth or convenience, with a national
team.2 From the late nineteenth century, a new conception of the individual subject
was formed and transformed through a vernacular language of nationhood, realized in
and through a range of emotionally and symbolically charged signs of national belong-
ing.3 These were invested with the weight of ritual: the ‘invention’ of formal and infor-
mal traditions that establish cultural continuity in relation to a particular construction
of the ‘past’.4 Contemporary historical and theoretical approaches to fashion, textiles
and dress emphasize how clothing and other forms of bodily adornment are a specific
mode of embodied social practices, that is, complex cultural forms invested with social
meanings.5 Textiles, clothing and dress were a key part of the ‘dressing’ of an invented
national cultural heritage, and the mythologizing of historical events and figures in and
through popular representation.6 Civil and military uniforms became a significant vehi-
cle of collective regulation; their design organized the core values that distinguished
one set of nationalist ideals from the other, as well as marking hierarchies within forces
and statutory institutions.7 ‘National’ costumes were revived and reinvented, and drew
on elements of traditional ethnic clothing to create an ambiguous sense of belonging

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through a ‘folk’ history whose sources were essentially ‘urban, politicized, elitist and
educated’.8

In the opening paragraph of Benedict Anderson’s influential polemic on the constitution

of the nation state, the modern phenomenon of Cenotaphs and tombs to ‘Unknown
Soldiers’ is used as an emblematic model of nationalism.9 By their very nature, Anderson
argues, these essentially empty spaces and anonymous bodies are without identifying
characteristics, yet they are saturated with meaning. What else could these unknown
bodies be but German, American, or Argentine? Through the workings of a collec-
tive national imagination they are part of an ‘imagined community’ clothed in highly
culturally specific concepts of national identity. To reinforce this argument, Anderson
cites United States General Douglas MacArthur’s colour-coded analogy of military sac-
rifice as one of ‘a long grey line [ . . . ] a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki,
in blue and grey [ . . . ]’10 Nationhood is symbolically and very materially fashioned and
fabricated: Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ might be invisible, but it is never naked.

In its formal design and presentation, athletic and sporting clothing conveys a sense
of ideological neutrality accorded through the shared nature of the climactic, physical,
socio-economic, and cultural conditions of active participation. However, such ubiquity
and a belief in sport as a universal panacea belies sporting clothing’s role as a power-
fully expressive and instrumental force. Through a whole chain of cultural signification,
the wearing of new forms of sports and leisure clothing in the nineteenth century func-
tioned to embody highly complex and nuanced systems of social distinction and cul-
tural nationalism, and the ideologies of class, race and gender that sustained them. As
much as his military counterpart, the anonymous body of the athletic Olympian used,
for example, to promote the London Games of 1908 was loaded with utopian ideals of
universal sporting comradeship that already exemplified culturally coded actions, tem-
perament and modes of behaviour uniquely associated with particular national iden-
tities. The modern Olympic arena effectively provided a new forum for these national
sporting bodies to be discursively organized in and through sporting competition, and
create a new type of ‘imagined community’ through a whole network of representa-
tional associations.

The time frame of this essay encompasses the Games of the modern era that straddle
the First World War. This was a significant period in Olympic history that witnessed the

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
254
 introduction of international sporting competition, and as a consequence, the incep-
tion of the parade of national teams as a crucial element of Olympic ceremony and
ritual. The focus of the essay is to explore how such change was embodied at a sym-
bolic and material level. It traces the shift from the wearing of competitive attire in
London in 1908 in the first Parade of Nations, through the introduction of new and dis-
tinctive forms of national ceremonial sporting in Stockholm in 1912, to Paris in 1924,
where such clothing had become a recognizable and familiar repertoire of emblematic
nationalism.

The institution of new types of national and international competitive bodies and the
allied evolution of new and distinctive forms of ceremonial sporting dress were key
elements in establishing the ‘timeless’ rituals of Olympic universalism and a new arena
of competitive ideological prestige in which all the panoply of emerging nationalism
might be brought to bear. With some justification, ideals of British sporting amateurism
were seen as the lodestone of modern Olympic idealism, but it was a model of sporting
nationhood that by the fin de siècle was seen as constantly under threat, particularly
from Germany and the USA. This essay seeks to argue that sporting ceremonial cloth-

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ing can be seen as a crucial conduit through which to examine how nineteenth century
notions of British sportsmanship were appropriated and adapted to the new conditions
of modern sporting competition before and in the aftermath of the First World War.

Form and function

Organized sport in Britain was the product of mutually productive and increasingly
regulated systems of work and leisure time brought about by the industrial revolution
and the mechanisms of industrial capitalism.11 Up until the mid-nineteenth century,
the wearing of more or less ordinary clothing was deemed sufficient for most forms of
sport or athletic exercise. However, Georg Simmel’s 1905 commentaries on fashion and
dress in the nineteenth century and Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 theories of an emerging
‘leisure class’ both demonstrate the growing significance of clothing and fashionable
consumption in the new spaces of the modern city.12 Here, a sense of self was increas-
ingly negotiated through the relationship between environment and self-presentation.
The adoption of fashionable and functional activity-specific clothing and distinctive
forms of kit swiftly became de rigueur for all types of sporting and leisure activities.13
The rapid transformation of modern sport was a crucial impetus to wider technical
innovations in design, manufacture and retail of warm, practical functional clothing
for travel and holidays, as well as sport and leisure.14 Looser, boxier designs in out-
door coats and jackets were a major breakthrough and incorporated new patterns,
weights and colours in woollen cloths to differentially target a growing popular lei-
sure market.15 Sarah Levitt’s examination of registered clothing designs before 1900
demonstrates how the ‘sporting mania’ that gripped late Victorian society provided a
particularly fruitful avenue of sartorial innovation.16

However, as Peter Bailey argues, ‘[l]eisure was one of the major frontiers of social
change in the nineteenth century, and like most frontiers it was disputed territory’.17
Social status was a powerful determinant in shaping participation. Sport, in a British
social context, assumed a huge ideological significance in marking out the parameters
of an evolving middle class social imaginary. Endowed with a sense of moral and spir-
itual leadership, the doctrine of ‘muscular’ Christian manliness provided a platform
for the British middle class from which to subdue the threatening political demands of
an urban working class, and counter the socio-economic and cultural dominance of

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
255
the aristocracy.18 This dualism is important because it constitutes one of the founding
symbolic oppositions of Victorian discourse.19 Grounded in the Victorian male psyche,
the body of the modern ‘athletic’ hero provided an open forum for the negotiation
of a new hierarchy of distinction and class difference; it also operated as a powerful
antidote to bourgeois patriarchal insecurity.20

Over the course of the nineteenth century, highly coded forms of appropriate dress
and deportment that reflected the tastes and social mores of an emerging middle
class developed for both men and women. John Mangan describes how the British
Victorian public school served as a breeding ground for this cult of athleticism and
sporting enthusiasm.21 An elaborate caste system evolved around a muscular Chris-
tian masculine ideal and hierarchical structures of athletic accomplishment, organized
and regulated through symbol and ritual made meaningful through sporting dress and
deportment. The winning of ‘colours’ and the wearing of scarves, ties, cravats, differ-
ent types of caps and hats, sweaters and blazers and a vast assortment of often bizarre
forms of adornment were governed by intricate rules stating who could wear what,
and how and when, to reinforce an institutionalized spectacular system of status and

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belonging.22 These formative sporting and social credentials extended into adulthood,
strengthened by a growing ‘old boy’ network, and a culture of formal and informal
masculine sporting participation that emerged in the late nineteenth century through
a massive expansion of upper class sporting clubs, societies and associations. Sports
historian Richard Holt notes how the wearing of, for example, the bright colours of
the Harlequin Rugby Football Club, or the pale blue of Eton college, or the pink of the
Carthusians of Charterhouse School, or the cerise of the Leander rowing club, all spec-
tacularly functioned to display and validate the power, social status and superior moral
authority of a British social elite.23

Nevertheless, by the 1880s such systems of sporting display and social networking
were also widely disseminated within the rapidly expanding milieu of middle and lower
middle class suburban sporting clubs and associations, similarly organized around affil-
iations of educational and autodidactic institution, church, and workplace or trade
association. In London, specialist athletic outfitters, such as Gamages and the early sub-
urban department store Bon Marché in Brixton, retailed a vast array of multi-coloured
and patterned jackets, caps, scarves, jerseys, vests, and a diversity of sporting cloth-
ing adorned with colours, emblems, buttons, badges and sashes, all of which equally
served as ritual signifiers of sporting and social ‘belonging’ [2].24 Nor were the urban
working class outside this spectacular apparatus of sartorial and sporting partisanship.
It was a vital part of a burgeoning mass popular leisure industry and the expansion
of professional sport—particularly association football—with teams concentrated in
particular and highly localized industrial communities. Affiliation to team and town
was materially realized in many and varied emblems, patterns and colour-ways of team
uniforms.25

Sporting clothing played a pivotal role in reinforcing a tiered system of class-based

social exclusion and inclusion, but its instrumental power lay as much in mechanisms
of implicit recognition as in explicit declaration. Through the institution and govern-
ance of new sporting bodies, rules concerning membership, inter-club competition,
standards of behaviour and dress codes were all rigidly enforced, the most signifi-
cant of these being the distinction made between amateur and professional status.26
The differences between the two were complex, and the subject of relentless eth-
ical debate across sporting disciplines.27 Playing the game for the game’s sake rather
than for any financial reward came to represent the peak of British sporting idealism,

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
256

Fig 2.  Catford Cycling Club,
‘Racing colours of cardinal and
black’, CCC Road Race, c. 1887.
Reproduced with permission
from the Catford Cycling Club
Geraldine Biddle-Perry
but it also effectively excluded working class players from
high-class  competition.28 Those engaged in manual labour
were considered to possess an unfair muscular advantage
over gentlemanly ‘absolute enthusiasts’. For example, in the
1870s all major rowing clubs excluded any oarsman who
‘had rowed for a stake, money or entrance fee or pursued or
assisted athletic practice as a means of gaining a livelihood’,
anyone who was employed in or about boats for wages and
any man ‘who is or has been, by trade or employment for
wages, a mechanic, artisan or labourer’.29 In the 1880s, the
Amateur Athletic Association [AAA] was founded to create
a ‘ring fence of gentleman amateurism’ that would maintain
the purity of competition untainted by money and counter-
act the risks posed to athletes by contamination from other
lesser beings: manual labourers, ‘pot hunters’ and other
‘athletic criminals’ competing for money or earning their liv-
ing from teaching or coaching.30
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Sporting colours were, therefore, not just markers of identi-
fication and sporting rivalry; their almost unilateral adoption
across western culture and increasing significance signalled
how sporting uniformity was now a highly politicized mech-
anism that could be harnessed to annex different and often
contentious social and ideological territories. Public school
sport and sporting prowess, backed up by an adulatory
popular press, came to be seen as characteristic of a specific type of British Christian
gentleman. Within and outside the confines of public school boyhood, sporting sym-
bol and ritual operated as ‘an instrument of segregation, of power, of control and as
a transmitter of cultural heritage’.31 The perceived unique qualities of British sport and
sportsmanship became enmeshed in the propagandist values of late-Victorian imperi-
alism and Social Darwinism and the god-given right of white men to rule and civilize
other inferior races.32 The British amateur ideal and its clothing brought together
issues of class, race and nationhood, in a sartorially coded masculine body that was
seen as a locus of sporting ‘purity’. By the 1890s it had already assumed an exagger-
ated symbolic power; with the revival of the Olympic Games it now took on an extra
layer of fabrication.
Fashioning the Olympic ideal
Contemporary with the inception of the modern Olympics in 1896, the society maga-
zine Vanity Fair had published a cartoon by ‘Spy’ of one of Britain’s finest young sport-
ing specimens, Walter Erskine Crum (‘Crumbo’), President of the Oxford University
Boat Club (OUBC) [3]. The portrait, one of a whole series of illustrations that featured
each week in the magazine, is typical of the mix of the sardonic and sycophantic tone
that characterized these popular political, literary, and sporting sketches.
‘Crumbo’ adopts a nonchalant stance, clothed in the dark blue colours of Oxford – a
blazer undone to reveal a white ‘cricket’ jersey edged in blue and embroidered with the
initials of the OUBC. Crum is described as, ‘a fine young specimen of English manhood
[ . . . ] a very well-built young fellow of much symmetry and proportion’. His achieve-
ments on and off the sporting field are matched by the remarkable ‘peculiarities’ of his
257
appearance, ‘a beautiful complexion, an almost girlish look,
a very frequent blush (which is the outcome of much mod-
esty), a temper that will bear much chaff, and a chin that
in times of depression looks as though it would fall off and
explode on the floor’.33

British and Olympic nationhood collided in the shared ideal-

ization of such an amateur sporting ‘type’, what Baron
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic move-
ment, described as a debrouillard: a man in possession of
a highly-trained body and an ability to adapt to various
environmental conditions, and bestowed with a supposedly
class-less ‘nobility of spirit and character’.34 De Coubertin’s
primary philosophical influence for the Games’ revival was
the work of educational reformer Dr Thomas Arnold, who
had transformed the English public school in the 1830s.
De Coubertin perceived the English emphasis on sport as a

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vital factor in empire-building, and was keen to learn how
‘lessons of endurance and perseverance learned in many a
hard-fought match’ might be more widely circulated and
promoted to counteract what he saw as the ills of modern
life.35 The modern Olympic ideal was a man who engaged
in the sorts of sports and games that de Coubertin believed
were exemplary in generating manly attributes.36 Rowing
was considered the quintessential sport for the modern
man; fencing (de Coubertin’s own specialty), equestrianism,
bicycling and utilitarian gymnastics were all similarly prized
for their corrective potential.37 However, before all things,
de Coubertin declared, it was necessary to ‘[ . . . ] preserve
in sport those characteristics of nobility and chivalry which
have distinguished it in the past. [ . . ] Imperfect humanity
has ever tended to transform the Olympic athlete into the paid gladiator. But the two Fig 3.  ‘Crumbo’ by ‘Spy’,
things are incompatible [ . . . ]’38 Vanity Fair, 19 March 1896,
p. 205. The Bodleian Library,
De Coubertin’s utopian aim for the revival of the Olympic Games was to create a University of Oxford, 2106 b.1
new kind of competitive sporting esprit de corps to overcome the pernicious spread
of professionalism; true athletic competition had to be based on ‘perfect disinter-
estedness and the sentiment of honor’.39 Individuals would gather from all over the
world to compete and display skills in a diverse range of sporting events representa-
tive of equally diverse forms of national sporting heritage. United in a shared desire
to engage in international sporting encounters, the supposed neutrality of nation-
alist endeavour would put an end to the discord that arose out of endless quarrels
over what constituted amateur status across sporting disciplines in every country.
De Coubertin argued:

[E]nnobled by the memories of the past, athletes all over the world will learn to
know one another better, to make mutual concessions, and to seek no other
reward in the competition than the honor of the victory. One may be filled with
desire to see the colors of one’s club or college triumph in a national meeting; but
how much stronger is the feeling when the colors of one’s country are at stake.40

The first modern Olympiad, staged in Athens in 1896, saw small groups of athletes,
led by standard-bearers carrying national flags, enter the horseshoe stadium rebuilt on

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
258
 the original site below the Acropolis. On the opening day, after a short speech from
the King of Greece and the performance of a specially composed Olympic anthem, the
games got immediately underway with the first event, the 100 metre ‘dash’. Over the
course of the Games, participants competed in a range of ‘modern’ sporting events in
the athletic, aquatic, equestrian, pugilistic and maritime disciplines. These joined with
other less well-known events, such as the ‘Greek discus’ and javelin contests, thought
to most closely envision the classical ideals of sporting antiquity that the Games sought
to ‘reconstruct’.41

A ‘generous national rivalry’ was acknowledged—but winning athletes competed and

stood before their flags adorned in the colours and emblems of club as much as those of
country, which when worn at all frequently took the form of sartorial adjuncts such as
armbands, scarves, and ribbons or badges tacked on to vests alongside the insignia of
these alternative systems of partisanship.42 The Official Report of the 1896 Games, for
example, describes the heightening of goodwill between Greeks and Americans as the
latter displayed ‘little Greek flags besides their own and the distinctive marks of orange
and black for Princeton and the unicorn’s head for the Boston Athletic Association.’43

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Only the Hungarian team offered a new form of sartorial sporting nationalism in their
adoption of a distinctive mark of national sporting uniformity outside of the competi-
tive arena. The Official Report of the 1896 Games, in a somewhat disapproving tone,
noted, ‘They certainly possess the art of self-advertisement to a very high degree. They
and their blue and white ribbons seemed to be ubiquitous; if one did not meet them
driving in a cab with the Hungarian flag at mast-head, one found them blocking the
traffic in a compact line stretched across the Rue de Stade.’44

Over the course of the nineteenth century most European states, as well as the Ameri-
can republics, had acquired national flags, flowers, and emblems. The discourse of
nineteenth-century nationalism sought to unify differences of history, birth, geography
and culture in the name of new forms of democratic freedom while at the same time
organizing such differences in positive and negative relational terms. Nationalism, in this
sense, always sought to represent difference as unity.45 Modern Olympic competition
sought to provide an arena for the spectacular enactment of such ‘unity’. Competing
nationalist visions were harnessed to concepts of a supposed Olympic universalism in
order to ‘unify and purify’ an amateur sporting ideal that was seen as increasingly under
threat.46 Emphasis was supposedly not on the performance of nations as teams but on
the achievements of individual athletes whose bodies came to stand in for a shared vision
of nationalist and Olympic altruistic intent.

The parade of athletes, London 1908

In Shepherds Bush on Monday 13 July 1908, at just before four o’clock the band of the
Grenadier Guards heralded the arrival of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to open the
London Games. A little while later to the sound of a bugle call, the gates to the arena opened
and the competing teams marched into the White City Stadium, four abreast behind lead
athletes carrying an Olympic standard bearing the name of each nation and a national flag.
The continental teams came first, in alphabetical order, followed by the English-speaking
nations led by the USA, and then the British Empire contingent—South Africa, Canada and
Australasia (Australia and New Zealand)—with the host nation bringing up the rear.47

Some two thousand athletes ‘in the pink of condition’ paraded around the White City
track.48 According to newly drawn-up regulations, representatives of each nation were

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
259
expected—but not compelled—to appear ‘in the athletic costume of his country or of
the sport in which he intends to compete’, unless it was raining, whereupon suitable
attire was left ‘entirely to the discretion of the manager of each team’.49 After days of
rain, the sun finally appeared. The Australian swimming team, despite the vagaries of
the British weather, appeared in swimming costumes and caps; some members had
bare feet. The teams of Finland, Norway, and Sweden were ‘especially notable’ for the
neatness of their nautically-inspired all-white gymnastic costume, with matching white
soft brimmed hats.50 The ‘Germans and Holsteinlands’ were dressed entirely in navy
blue, made more notable by their ‘mechancled [sic] high-stepping movement’. The Ital-
ians elected for white knickerbocker breeches with dark military-style jackets and flat
straw hats.51 The French team wore kepis (the boxy, flat-topped cap with a straight peak
adopted by the French military), figure-hugging white jerseys and twill breeches with
knee-length boots. Competitors representing the USA had been provided with match-
ing clothing to be worn on the voyage over: trousers trimmed with a red, white and blue
stripe down the outer seam, white jerseys with the emblem of the USA on the breast,
and a matching blue cloth cap. However, on the day, just fifteen athletes out of a squad
of 122 appeared in the parade in everyday leisure attire of tweed knickerbockers or dark

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lounge suits, with only the blue cap adorned with the stars and stripes providing a sense
of nationalist sporting endeavour.52

Finally, the British team entered the Stadium, headed by athletes in ubiquitous white
athletic shorts and vests edged in club or college colours, worn with blazers in dark or
light blue or matching cricket jumpers. This sartorial inconsistency was matched by a
parade formation that seemed to lack synchronicity, reinforced by an air of diffidence,
conveyed in the participants’ nonchalant stroll rather than an orchestrated march round
the track [4]. A sense of aesthetic and national uniformity was, however, achieved with
the addition of a white peaked cricket cap that was worn by all, adorned with the Union
Jack [5].

To contemporary eyes the overall visual effect appears casual rather than polished, and
presents a rather lacklustre demonstration of a host nation’s sporting prestige. Com-
pelled under the IOC’s new ruling to compete as a unified national team, the English
rose and the symbols of the other three of Britain’s ‘Home nations’ were subsumed
into the institution of British Olympic nationhood that now ‘united’ them competitively
under the banner of the Union Jack. However, Richard Holt contends that this was not
symbolic of an oppressive discourse of hegemonic nationalist power. The enforced uni-
fication only strengthened wider national loyalties and ties by allowing supporters and
competitors the opportunity to affirm an affiliation with both the ‘cultural’ nation and
the federal nation state that Olympic competition required.53

Cultural historian Stuart Hall argues:

We only know what it is to be ‘English’ because of the way ‘Englishness’ has come to
be represented, as a set of meanings, by English culture. It follows that a nation is not
only a political entity but something which produces meanings—a system of cultural
representation. People are not only legal citizens of a nation; they participate in the
idea of the nation as represented in its national culture.54

For a unified Great Britain team, club was not more important than country. It was rather
that club and country were in many ways ideologically seen as one and the same. Embodied
concepts of Christian manliness had long functioned to reconcile the essential paradoxes of
sporting competition and public school life. The much-vaunted idealism of Christian esprit
de corps co-existed with the reification of relentless individual struggle for victory; ruthless

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
260
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Fig 4.  Opening Ceremony,
London 1908, The Sphere,
18 July 1908, © The British
Library Board

aggression and gentlemanly conduct were both part of a games system ‘fully in accord
with the cryptic and misleading Darwinian apothegm, “the survival of the fittest”’.55

An ambiguous mix of Olympic, national and international sporting ideals was articulated
not just in the wearing of particular types of clothing, emblems or colours, but in the

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
261
capacity of such clothing to differentially communicate the
­meaning of what were perceived by each nation as unique
codes of sportsmanship and sporting prowess. The inherent
tensions contained in the British team’s presentation were
brought together under the unifying device of the national
flag and a shared belief in a powerful, uniquely British sense
of sportsmanship.56 Entering the White City Stadium in 1908,
displaying an air of modest diffidence and a lack of regimenta-
tion in dress and bearing was not evidence of a disjunction of
nationalist feeling; it was the means by which disjuncture was
negotiated and subsumed.

De Coubertin’s modern Olympic ideal facilitated an inter-

pretation of British sporting nationalism that functioned to
counter various challenges to imperial authority at home and
abroad, as well as in the sporting arena.57 Sport was seen to
still provide a measure of the nation’s continued supremacy

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and an instrument with which to retain its superiority in the
world.58 Reflecting on the British team’s lack of success in
London in 1908, Theodore Cook commented:
Fig 5.  White Great Britain
It is obvious, of course, that some victories are worth more than others. But so 1908 Olympic Football Team
much has been said about the ‘failure’ of the British athletes that it may be well to Cap, original recipient unknown.
point out the price the Americans had to pay for specialising in the stadium events. Reproduced with permission
from Graham Budd Auctions
Their successes were very great and they thoroughly deserved them; but outside
‘track athletics,’ in the stricter sense, they did very little. [ . . . ] England no longer
stands alone, as once she did, as the apostle of ‘hard exercise’ [ . . . ] We have had
to see our pupils beat us, and we can but work our hardest to continue giving
them a stubborn contest for supremacy.59 

German and ‘Nordic’ efficiency and an inherent ability for mechanistic, militaristic gym-
nastic display were an essential part of a long-standing and familiar comparative currency
of British militaristic and sporting jingoism.60 American training methods, allied with a
focus on track and field events, had resulted in them dominating athletic competition.
But the American strategy of ‘specialization’, where athletes trained and competed in
just one or two events, was seen by many within the British sporting fraternity as an
insult to ‘fair play’ and the British sporting ideal of the ‘good all-rounder’.61 The 1908
Games had brought international rivalry between the two nations to a head, through
various incidents on and off the track that were seen by the Americans as intentional
slights and bias on the part of the British Olympic Council (BOC).62 The BOC, backed up
by the British popular press and contemporary accounts of the Games, viewed such a
response as only further confirmation of American insecurity and aggression.63

‘The Grand March Past’, Stockholm 1912

In the ‘Grand March Past’ in the Stockholm Games of 1912, more than 3,000 par-
ticipants entered the stadium. The Nordic and Russian national teams, as they had in
1908, paraded in variations of matching gymnastic or athletic sports dress, and their
all-white purity again mirrored and emphasized the military precision of their move-
ment around the stadium. The US team, now marching in its entirety, appeared slickly
kitted out in uniform white jackets, blue trousers and boaters that they clasped to
their chest in unison as they passed the Royal Box. In contrast, ‘strapping’ German

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
262
 competitors were identically attired in dark blue suits, with bow ties and a form of
‘Prince Heinrich’ cap; their very sobriety made the team stand out amongst the colour-
ful procession.64 The Great Britain team now too exhibited a unified—if not entirely
uniform—national sartorial statement, in the adoption of various types of lounge suits
worn with matching hats, ties, and badges in the red, white and blue of the British
Olympic Association (BOA) colours.65

The discourse of Olympic endeavour was one in which different sporting activities and
events and their most successful advocates were now inextricably bound up in an arena
of competitive nationalist ideological prestige.66 In the London Games, four years previ-
ously, the ‘Britishers’ had been marked out by their ability to be represented in virtually
every sporting discipline from fencing to swimming.67 Now, they no longer diffidently
strolled into the arena in crumpled shorts and a sartorial jumble of diverse sporting
affiliation; they marched into the arena, along with many other teams, in a recogniz-
able form of appropriate, ‘official’ sporting ceremonial attire. Even so, reflecting on the
Grand March Past, the BOC commented, ‘Few of us would care to see England take its
games quite in the American spirit, and the admiration which we feel for those splen-

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did bands of Scandinavian gymnasts is not unmingled, in the case of most of us, with
a certain shamed contempt.’68

De Coubertin himself was not unaware of the importance of sporting dress. Writing
in Le Revue Olympique in 1909 he observed, ‘Who would dare to say that when we
have swapped our jacket for a fencer’s dress, that our mentality would remain exactly
the same as before.’69 If a man fought better in uniform than in civilian dress, de Cou-
bertin concluded, there was no reason to believe that this would not be the case with
regard to sporting uniform. The donning of sporting clothing stimulated the ‘sportif
emotion’, the pleasurable anticipation of sporting action (what De Coubertin using
an equestrian analogy describes as ‘the intoxication of the gallop’).70 The sporting
costume of early British Olympians reflected an historical sartorial culture of sporting
achievement, with its ideological foundations in concepts of voluntarism, individual-
ity of expression and the possession of ‘natural ability’. Such ideals were embodied in
class-based obfuscating rituals pertaining to dress, and the adoption of often bizarre
forms of headgear such as the fez, as well as the attribution of specific physical
manifestations to superior sporting types such as lounging and strolling in a par-
ticular way. However, the modern Olympic ideal and the aristocratic sporting ‘type’
upon which it was based were by 1912, if not entirely obsolete, then increasingly
countered by new models of sporting prowess. Exemplified in the figure of the track
athlete, American notions of athletic ‘specialization’ were mirrored in the growing
specialization of sporting clothing, for example ‘track’ suits for training and pre- and
post-performance, new forms of competitive kit, as well as ‘official’ uniforms for sport-
ing ceremonial occasions. A British ‘athletocracy’ were caught in the crossfire between
a nineteenth-century vision of Imperial and industrial primacy and its twentieth-century
decline and contestation played out in the sporting arena.

Conclusion: ‘An exceedingly fine appearance’, Paris 1924

The idealized masculinity that lay at the heart of Baron de Coubertin’s and others’
utopian vision of modern Olympianism sought to create a shared identity that would
counteract more contentious attempts at collective sporting idealism.71 However, de
Coubertin appropriated and recast the symbols of the ancient Games according to
his understanding of ‘authentic’ nationalism expressed through sporting competition.
Linking modern sport with ideals of classical antiquity, de Coubertin created a new

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
263
myth of international competition which, if it supposedly stood ‘above politics’, in fact
only further mystified the processes by which ‘state, class, and patriarchal power was
established and maintained’.72

By the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Games in 1924, the British team appeared in
matching team uniforms and marched in smart formation into the arena. The Parade is
described in some detail in the BOA report:

As each team passed, we were able to take stock of them all—from the Ameri-
cans, the greatest and most imposing, to Haiti, the smallest. Great Britain’s team,
headed by three giants and with the pipers of the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s
Own Cameron Highlanders marching at their head, presented an exceedingly fine
and smart appearance, the men wearing blue blazers, white trousers, and straw
hats with blue band; and the ladies blue coats, cream pleated skirts, and white-felt
hats and blue band [ . . .] they entered the arena marching with a swing and bear-
ing which earned great applause from the assembled spectators; and as we looked
on and at the same time back on the past Olympiads, when the importance of the

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opening ceremony was not fully appreciated by the Council, we heaved a sigh of
relief, and congratulated ourselves on the fact that this side of the Games, so far
as Great Britain was concerned, had been placed in capable hands.73 

The culturally contrived ambiguities of ceremonial sporting sartorial display were now
an established part of the repertoire of Olympic spectacle. The British team’s ‘exceed-
ingly fine appearance’ blended into a sea of other national blazer jackets, differentiated
only by the colour of cloth and trim and the symbols displayed on breast pockets, ties,
scarves and a variety of sporting headgear—felt hats, peaked caps, straw boaters, Pana-
mas and berets. Together these formed the contours of appropriate Olympic ceremonial
attire that set the pattern for future appearances at international and Olympic events.
However, a lack of sartorial innovation in the formal design aesthetic of ceremonial
clothing should not be seen as evidence of a lack of understanding of the presentational
possibilities of the Olympic arena and its expanding rituals. Overlapping discourses of
national sporting achievement and inherent sporting qualities have a shared symbolic
and material embodiment in the development of similar forms of competitive and cer-
emonial sporting clothing, whose adoption has come to be seen as both essential and
‘timeless’. However, in the context of the growing bodykultur of European fascism in
the 1920s, the presentational possibilities offered by the sporting body demonstrate
how such essentialism and the very ubiquity of apparently identical white athletic strips
or blazers and flannels might continue to operate as a lodestone of nationalist ambition.

Ideals of sporting nationalism are the subject of constantly shifting ideals of what nation-
hood might mean at any one time. These might appear ‘timeless’ and essential—that
is their motivating force—but their formal organization and cultural expression need to
be constantly negotiated, contested and changed in order to fulfil such a purpose. In
the aftermath of the First World War, it was difficult for any Olympic participant to be
regarded other than as a representative of his own nation, ‘whose ideology and policy
he was taken to personify’.74 Visions of a new international order and world peace were
rapidly submerged beneath the realities of international politics. Any allied notion of an
Olympic sporting utopia could not rise above the conflict and lingering grievances inher-
ent in the play and power play of competing nation states both on and off the field.

National and international sport continued to be dogged by debates about professional

‘broken time’ payments and what constituted the nature of the ‘true’ amateur. This
was linked to wider concepts of nationalist ambition and aggression, certainly in B
­ ritain

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
264
 where American ‘specialization’ in track and field and the bending by ‘foreigners’ of
the rules of amateur competition were still seen as contrary to the ideals of a level play-
ing field of gentlemanly rivalry that, it was believed, Britain alone sought to uphold.

Henning Eichberg’s discussion of the fashioning of the Danish gymnastic team at the
end of the nineteenth century argues that nationalism is as pluralistic as sport; differ-
ent models of national identification correspond to different body cultural configura-
tions that constantly overlap.75 These shape and reshape conflicting and conforming
narratives of an evolving Olympic ‘ideal’ that continue to be embodied in costumed
tableaux of multiple and shifting national imaginaries and the performative power of
spectacle.76 Whatever de Coubertin and others’ aspirations for the modern Olympic
nationhood purported to be, their ideological foundations were firmly cemented in the
power-relations of the late nineteenth century: class based notions of what sport ought
to be, ‘limited by the nature of the economic system as a whole and the network of
social institutions associated with it’.77 The Games provided a new forum for the perfor-
mance of particular conceptions of national sporting ‘traditions’ that rapidly assumed a
central place in the mythologizing of very specific national aptitudes and characteristics.

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In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the idealized body of the upper-class
sporting ‘all-rounder’ served as the British imperial bulwark against growing threats
from European and North American economic and military expansion and a lack of
sporting success. In 1908, British and Olympic idealism was unified in a shared under-
standing of what was seen as a deeper sense of ‘all-round’ and thus ‘authentic’ sporting
partisanship. In the aftermath of the First World War, the ‘amateur hegemony’ of British
sport and governmental policy would have to be adapted and appropriated to the new
conditions of modern nationalism: the decline of Empire and the rise of fascism.78

No one concept of athletic idealism could operate in isolation from wider shifting
concepts of sporting prestige and growing international tensions both on and off the
sporting field. The modern Olympic movement sought to territorialize a utopian ideal
to give expression to a new kind of sporting identity that might somehow exist outside
of more problematic attempts at nineteenth-century nation building and discordant
definitions of sporting amateurism.79 But after 1908 international sporting competition
became an increasingly powerful ideological theatre.80 The development of national
sporting ceremonial clothing was both an expressive response and an instrumental
source of propaganda for such a discourse.

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London
E-mail: g.biddle-perry@csm.arts.ac.uk

Dr Geraldine Biddle-Perry is Associate Lecturer in Cultural Studies, at Central Saint Martins

College of Art and Design, London. Current research is concerned with the fashioning
and fabrication of the modern leisured body in the first half of the twentieth century and
its social history. Her research draws on new approaches to the critical study of fashion
and dress to examine a complex mix of the shifting cultural-aesthetic conditions of
fashionable and sports and leisure-specific clothing’s promotion, retailing, representation
and consumption and the socio-economic and technological impetus of its production.

If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on
http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending e-mail
responses to the editorial board and other readers.

Geraldine Biddle-Perry
265
Notes
1 M. McIntire, ‘National Status, The 1908 Olympic Games and
the English Press’, Media History, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 271–86.
2 T. A. Cook (ed.), The Fourth Olympiad, London 1908: Official
Report, British Olympic Council, London, 1908, pp. 24–5.
3 E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–
1914’, in The Invention of Tradition, E. Hobsbawm & T. Ran-
ger (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983,
pp.  263–307. See also S. Hall, ‘The Question of Cultural
Identity’, in Modernity and Its Futures, S. Hall, D. Held & T.
McGrew (eds), Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 273–325.
4 Hobsbawm & Ranger, op. cit.
5 E. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Vir-
ago, London, 1985; see also J. Entwistle, The Fashioned
Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 2000.
6 J. Faiers, Tartan (Textiles That Changed the World), Berg,
Oxford, 2008.
7 J. Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgres-
sion, Berg, Oxford, 2005, pp. 32–8.
8 L. Taylor, The Study of Dress History, Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 2002, pp. 213–4.
9 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983.
10 McArthur, Address to West Point, 12 May 1962, in Ander-
son, op cit., pp. 2–3.
11 R. Holt, Sport and the British: A  Modern History, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1989.
12 G. Simmel, Fashion, Fox Duffield & Co., London, 1905,
and ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in The Sociology of
Georg Simmel, K. H. Wolff (ed.), Free Press of Glencoe, New
York, 1964, 409–17; T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure
Class, Macmillan, New York & London, 1899, republished
by Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1994.
13 A. Mansfield & P. Cunnington, English Costume for Sports
and Outdoor Recreation from the Sixteenth to the Nine-
teenth Centuries, A. C. Black, London, 1969.
14 E. Wilson & L. Taylor, Through the Looking Glass: A History of
Dress from 1860 to the Present Day, BBC Books, London, 1989,
pp. 56–8.
15 L. Taylor, ‘Cloth and Gender: An Investigation into the
Gender-specific Use of Woollen Cloth in the Tailored Dress
of British Women in the 1865–1885 Period’, in Defining
Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning, and Identity, Amy de la
Haye & Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Manchester University Press,
Manchester, 1999, pp. 30–47.  Olympique, February 1909, pp. 26–29 [translation mine].
16 S. Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for
Clothing, their Makers and Wearers, 1839–1900, George
Allen & Unwin, London, 1984, p. 204.
Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 1896–1924
266
17 P. Bailey, Leisure and class in Victorian England: Rational Rec-
reation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1855, London:
Routledge, 1978, p. 5.
18 N. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian
Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought,
New York, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
19 D. Hall, ‘On the Making and Unmaking of Monsters: Chris-
tian Socialism, Muscular Christianity, and the Metaphoriza-
tion of Class Conflict’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying
the Victorian Age, D. Hall (ed.), Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1994, p. 51.
20 B. Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978.
21 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian
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Public School: the Emergence and consolidation of an Edu-
cational Ideology, Frank Cass, London, 1981.
22 Ibid, p. 170.
23 Holt, op. cit., p.116. 
24 Catford Cycling Club, Rules and Fixtures, 1887. The rule
book of the Catford Cycling Club describes the uniform of
the CTC (Catford Touring Club), the racing arm of the club,
-as consisting of ‘racing colours of cardinal and black’ in
vest and breeches of either stockinet (6s 6d) or a cheaper
cotton version (1s 6d), that could both be obtained at the
Bon Marché in Brixton. 
25 M. A. Taylor, The Association Game: A History of British
Football, Pearson Education, Harlow, 2008, pp. 90–98.
26 Ibid, pp. 91–4.
27 J. Lowerson, Sport and the English middle classes 1870–
1914, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993, pp.
154–86
28 Ibid, pp. 155, 170–4.
29 S. Wagg, ‘“Base Mechanic Arms”? British Rowing, Some
Ducks and the Shifting Politics of Amateurism’, Sport in His-
tory, vol. 26, no. 3, 2006, pp. 53–9.
30 Lowerson, op. cit., p. 166.
31 Ibid, p. 142.
32 J. McKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester Univer-
sity Press, Manchester, 1984.
33 ‘Spy’ (pseud.), ‘Men of Today’, Vanity Fair, 19 March 1896,
p. 205.
34 P. de Coubertin, ‘La psychologie du costume sportif’, Le Revue
35 F. Webster, The evolution of the Olympic Games, 1829
BC–1914 AD, Heath, Cranton & Ouseley Ltd., London,
1914, p. 176.
36 P. de Coubertin, ‘La philosophie du debrouillard’, Une Cam-
pagne de vingt-et-un-ans, Librairie de l’education physique,
Paris, 1909, pp. 216–20 [translation mine].
37 Ibid.
38 Quoted in T. A. Cook, The Cruise of the Branwen. Being a
short history of the modern revival of the Olympic Games,
privately published, London, 1908.
39 P. de Coubertin, ‘The Olympic Games of 1896’, The Century
Magazine, no. 53, November 1896, p. 31.
40 Ibid.
41 B. Kidd, ‘The myth of the ancient Games’ in Five-Ring Circus:
Money, Power and Politics at the Olympic Games, Alan Tomlin-
son & Gary Whannel (eds), Pluto Press, London & Sydney, 1984.
42 S. Lambros & N. G. Politis, The Official Report of the 1896
Olympic Games Part One, The Olympic Games B.C. 776–
A.D. 1896, H. Grevel & Co., London, 1896, p. 49.
43 Ibid, p. 50.
44 Ibid, p. 56.
45 S. Hall, op. cit., p. 297.
46 De Coubertin, ‘The Olympic Games of 1896’, op. cit.
47 K. Baker, The 1908 Olympics: The First London Games,
Sportsbooks Ltd., London, 2008.
48 Daily Mail, 14 July 1908.
49 T. A. Cook (ed.), The Fourth Olympiad, op. cit. The Report
notes how much the BOC was indebted to the work of
Mr Robert Mitchell of the London Polytechnic in preparing
these regulations, p. 29.
50 Baker, op. cit.
51 Daily Mirror, 14 July 1908.
52 Jenkins, op. cit., pp. 96, 121.
53 R. Holt, ‘Contrasting Nationalisms: Sport, Militarism and the
Unitary State in Britain and France before 1914’, in Tribal
Identities: Nationalism, Europe, Sport, J. A. Mangan (ed.),
Frank Cass, London, 1996, pp. 39–54. 
54 S. Hall, op. cit., p. 292.
55 Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public
School, op. cit., p. 135.  pp. 100–23.
56 R. Holt, ‘Champions, Heroes and Celebrities; Sporting
Greatness and the British Public’, in The Book of British
Sporting Heroes, James Huntington-Whiteley, National Por-
trait Gallery, London, 1998.
57 M. Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular
Culture, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.
58 McIntire, op. cit., p. 273.
59 Cook, The Voyage of the Branwen, op. cit., pp. 89, 103.
60 Holt, ‘Contrasting Nationalisms’, op. cit., p. 42.
Geraldine Biddle-Perry
61 Ibid, pp. 279–80.
62 G. Kent, Olympic Follies: The Madness and Mayhem of the
1908 London Games, J. R. Books, London, 2008, pp. 38–9,
154–7.
63 Jenkins, op. cit, pp. 153–5.
64 W. Borgers, ‘Fashion at the Games, Part Two: The Offi-
cial Uniform and Changing Style’, Olympic Review, no.
308, June 1993, p.  319. The ‘Prince Heinrich’ was a
nautically-inspired peaked cap associated with the German
Admiral, Prince Henry of Prussia.
65 The Swedish Olympic Committee, Erik Bergvall (ed.),
Edward Adams-Ray (trans.), The Official Report of the Olym-
pic Games of Stockholm 1912, The Swedish Olympic Com-
mittee, p. 109.
66 P. McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity, and
Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880–1935,
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Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 138–144.
67 Daily Mail, 14 July 1908. 
68 The Swedish Olympic Committee, op. cit., p. 12.i.
69 De Coubertin, ‘La psychologie du costume sportif’, op. cit.,
pp. 26–27.
70 Ibid, p. 27.
71 A. Senn, Power, Politics and the Olympic Games, Human
Kinetics, Chicago, IL, 1999, p. 6.
72 Kidd, op. cit., p. 72.
73 British Olympic Association, The Official Report of the VIIIth
Olympiad, Paris 1924, British Olympic Association, London,
1925, p. 86.
74 P. Beck, ‘Politics and the Olympics: the lesson of 1924’, His-
tory Today, vol. 30, 1980, pp. 7–9.
75 H. Eichberg, ‘Body Culture and Democratic Nation-
alism: “Popular Gymnastics” in Nineteenth-Century
Denmark’, in Tribal Identities, Mangan (ed.), op. cit.,
pp. 121–2.
76 J. Hogan, ‘Staging the Nation: Gendered and Ethnicized
Discourses of National Identity in Olympic Opening Cer-
emonies’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 27, no. 2,
77 R. Gruneau, ‘Commercialism and the modern Olympics’, in
Five-Ring Circus, Tomlinson & Whannel (eds), p. 5.
78 L. Allison, Amateurism in Sport, Frank Cass, London, 2001,
pp. 50–65.
79 M. Polley, ‘The amateur ideal and British sports diplo-
macy, 1900–1945’, Sport in History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2006,
pp. 450–67.
80 McIntire, op. cit., p. 281.
267