Fred Perry M3 Shirt

The M3 is a short-sleeved shirt in cotton piqué, cut square and loose in what the maker calls a traditional boxy tennis fit. It has a flat collar, a placket of two buttons and a straight hem, and on the left breast a laurel wreath embroidered into the cloth. It is the plain version, one colour, without the stripes at the collar and cuffs that most people now associate with the name.

Fred Perry won Wimbledon three years in a row, from 1934 to 1936, before turning professional, and no British man won it again for seventy-seven years. In the late 1940s an Austrian footballer, Tibby Wegner, brought him a device worn round the wrist to stop sweat running into the hand, which Perry turned into the first sweatband. Wegner's next idea was a shirt: white knitted cotton piqué, short sleeves, a buttoned placket, along the lines of the shirt René Lacoste had been selling in France since 1933.

It was launched at Wimbledon in 1952 and sold at once. Perry founded the label in London that year and chose for its emblem a laurel wreath, after the old symbol of the championships, stitched into the fabric rather than sewn on as a badge. The company says the M3 has been made in England from the very start and is still cut in the same fit it has always had.

What happened next was not planned. In the 1950s the shirt was also made with twin stripes at the collar and cuffs, and in that form it left the court and became part of the uniform of British youth subcultures, adopted, as the company puts it, by each generation as its own. The family ran the label until 1995, when it was bought by the Japanese company Hit Union. The tipped M12 is the best known today; the M3 is the original.