British Olympic Ideal 1884-1924

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The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 18961924

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 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 nationalismnational; identitysporting dressceremonial attiresporting body ideals ideology

IntroductionThe staging of the London Olympic Games was an integral part of the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. Aleaflet designed to promote the exhibitions 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 feetwhich are clad in the latest lightweight athletic shoesand 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 team uniforms evolved in the nineteenth century, in relation to the progressive cat-egorization and regulation of professional and amateur sporting bodies in Britain. This shaped a British athletic ideal that then took on a highly-charged cultural potency

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253Geraldine Biddle-Perry

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,

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



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254Clothing the British Olympic Ideal: The Emergence of Olympic Ceremonial Attire, 18961924

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

In the opening paragraph of Benedict Andersons 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 MacArthurs 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: Andersons 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 clothings 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



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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 sicle was seen as constantly under threat, particularly from Germany and the USA. This essay seeks to argue that sporting ceremonial cloth-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 Simmels 1905 commentaries on fashion and dress in the nineteenth century and Thorstein Veblens 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 Levitts 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



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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 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 March 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 sportparticularly association footballwith 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 games sake rather than for any financial reward came to represent the peak of British sporting idealism,



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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

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 OlympicidealContemporary with the inception of the modern Olympics in 1896, the society maga-zine Vanity Fair had published a cartoon by Spy of one of Britains 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

Fig 2. Catford Cycling Club, Racing colours of cardinal and black, CCC Road Race, c. 1887. Reproduced with permission from the Catford Cycling Club



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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 Coubertins 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 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 Coubertins 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 things are incompatible [...]38

De Coubertins utopian aim for the revival of the Olympic Games was to create a 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 ones club or college triumph in a national meeting; but how much stronger is the feeling when the colors of ones 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

Fig 3. Crumbo by Spy, Vanity Fair, 19 March 1896, p.205. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2106 b.1



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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 acknowledgedbut 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 unicorns head for the Boston Athletic Association.43

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, London1908In Shepherds Bush on Monday 13 July 1908, at just before four oclock the band of the Grenadier Guards heralded the arrival of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to open the London Games. Alittle 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 contingentSouth 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



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expectedbut not compelledto 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 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]. Asense 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 nations sporting prestige. Com-pelled under the IOCs new ruling to compete as a unified national team, the English rose and the symbols of the other three of Britains 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 meaningsa 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



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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

Fig 4. Opening Ceremony, London 1908, The Sphere, 18July 1908, The British Library Board



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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 teams 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 Coubertins 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 nations continued supremacy and an instrument with which to retain its superiority in the world.58 Reflecting on the British teams lack of success in London in 1908, Theodore Cook commented:

It is obvious, of course, that some victories are worth more than others. But so much has been said about the failure of the British athletes that it may be well to point out the price the Americans had to pay for specialising in the stadium events. 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, Stockholm1912In 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

Fig 5. White Great Britain 1908 Olympic Football Team Cap, original recipient unknown. Reproduced with permission from Graham Budd Auctions



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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 unifiedif not entirely uniformnational 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-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 fencers 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. ABritish 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, Paris1924The idealized masculinity that lay at the heart of Baron de Coubertins 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



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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 allfrom the Ameri-cans, the greatest and most imposing, to Haiti, the smallest. Great Britains team, headed by three giants and with the pipers of the 2nd Battalion of the Queens 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 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 teams 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 headgearfelt 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 essentialthat is their motivating forcebut 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 Britain



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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 Eichbergs 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.

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-PerryCentral Saint Martins College of Art and Design, LondonE-mail: [email protected]

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 clothings promotion, retailing, representation and consumption and the socio-economic and technological impetus of its production.

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Notes 1 M. McIntire, National Status, The 1908 Olympic Games and

the English Press, Media History, vol. 15, no. 3, pp.27186.

2 T. A. Cook (ed.), The Fourth Olympiad, London 1908: Official Report, British Olympic Council, London, 1908, pp.245.

3 E. Hobsbawm, Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 18701914, in The Invention of Tradition, E. Hobsbawm & T. Ran-ger (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 263307. 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.273325.

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.328.

8 L. Taylor, The Study of Dress History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, pp.2134.

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.23.

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, 40917; 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: AHistory of Dress from 1860 to the Present Day, BBC Books, London, 1989, pp. 568.

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 18651885 Period, in Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning, and Identity, Amy de la Haye & Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp.3047.

16 S. Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for Clothing, their Makers and Wearers, 18391900, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1984, p.204.

17 P. Bailey, Leisure and classin Victorian England: Rational Rec-reation and the Contest for Control, 18301855, 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 ClassConflict, 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 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 March in Brixton.

25 M. A. Taylor, The Association Game: A History of British Football, Pearson Education, Harlow, 2008, pp. 9098.

26 Ibid, pp. 914.

27 J. Lowerson, Sport and the English middle classes 18701914, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993, pp. 15486

28 Ibid, pp. 155, 1704.

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.539.

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 Olympique, February 1909, pp.2629 [translation mine].

35 F. Webster, The evolution of the Olympic Games, 1829 BC1914 AD, Heath, Cranton & Ouseley Ltd., London, 1914, p.176.



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36 P. de Coubertin, La philosophie du debrouillard, Une Cam-pagne de vingt-et-un-ans, Librairie de leducation physique, Paris, 1909, pp.21620 [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. 776A.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.3954.

54 S. Hall, op. cit., p.292.

55 Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, op. cit., p.135.

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.

61 Ibid, pp.27980.

62 G. Kent, Olympic Follies: The Madness and Mayhem of the 1908 London Games, J. R. Books, London, 2008, pp.389, 1547.

63 Jenkins, op. cit, pp. 1535.

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, 18801935, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 138144.

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.2627.

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.79.

75 H. Eichberg, Body Culture and Democratic Nation-alism: Popular Gymnastics in Nineteenth-Century Denmark, in Tribal Identities, Mangan (ed.), op. cit., pp.1212.

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, pp.10023.

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.5065.

79 M. Polley, The amateur ideal and British sports diplo-macy, 19001945, Sport in History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2006, pp.45067.

80 McIntire, op. cit., p.281.



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