“It is incredibly frustrating that this group has appropriated our black and yellow twin-tipped shirt and subverted our laurel wreath to their own ends,” the company said on its website last week. It is not, by a long stretch, a good look for Fred Perry. His group, much like an enraged Reddit sub-forum given vein-popping physical form, has been described as an alt-right fight club and hate group by Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), as white supremacists by Joe Biden,and classified as an extremist group by the FBI – even though McInnes rejects the notion that Proud Boys are racists. He believes western culture is under siege and that feminism is a cancer. McInnes, 50, is the Scottish-Canadian co-founder of Vice Media, and lives in Brooklyn. And yet, Proud Boys, an organisation allegedly founded as a joke by Gavin McInnes in the run-up the 2016 US election, has become instantly recognisable by its allegiance to Fred Perry’s black and yellow trim polo, forcing the brand to publicly distance itself and announce last week that it had withdrawn sales of the shirt in the US and Canada a year ago.
It’s unlikely he could have predicted his name would be used in 2020 to uniform a far-right male militia jacked up on violence and misogyny. W hen British tennis champion Fred Perry became the first player to win a career grand slam in 1935, he might have hoped his legacy would be defined by the stunning bit of history he made, still just 26 years old.
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