This New Clothing Brand Is a Tribute to Underrated Style Icon Arthur Ashe

Arthur Ashe was an incredible tennis player. He won three Grand Slam titles during his 11-year professional career (1969-1980). A one-time world number one, Ashe was also the first Black player selected to the United States national team and the only Black man ever to win the singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open or the Australian Open. By all accounts, he’s an all-time great.

But he was more than a tennis player. He was a dedicated AIDS educator — he publicly announced his diagnosis in 1992 and passed in 1993 — and a civil rights activist. He was arrested in several public protests, and he posthumously earned a Presidential Medal of Freedom from then President Bill Clinton.

There’s also a stadium named after him inside Corona Park in Queens, New York, Arthur Ashe Stadium, and it plays host to more than 23,000 fans and a few dozen players for US Open each year, making it the largest standalone tennis stadium in the world. It’s a fine facility with its own history now, but the keepers of his estate want his name to be more than just a landmark. They want Arthur Ashe to be remembered for what he did — but also how he looked doing it.

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“People know the stadium, and I think a lot of younger people know Ashe’s name just from that,” Karl Blanchard, Brand Director at Arthur Ashe, a new clothing line inspired by Ashe’s on- and off-court style. “But this is a different way of sharing his name and his story with people all over the world.”

Alongside Jack Carlson, the brand’s Creative Director (and the founder of Rowing Blazers), Blanchard worked with Ashe’s estate directly to create replicas of garments Ashe actually wore and spin-offs he would’d surely approved of. And a percentage of all proceeds are split between the UCLA’s Arthur Ashe Legacy Fund and the Social Change Fund United, two organizations the estate still supports to this day. A charitable component was something Ashe’s wife, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, emphasized, Carlson says.

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“The same way that brands do 1% for the Planet or a brand like Patagonia has the idea of giving back to environmental causes as part of its DNA, this is part of the DNA of the Arthur Ashe brand,” he says. “And this was part of the discussion with Jeanne from the beginning.”

Carlson says his connection to Moutoussamy-Ashe and Ashe’s estate stems from a friendship with Donald Dell, a former professional tennis player that was at one point Ashe’s teammate and then his agent.

“Donald and Arthur were close friends and Davis Cup teammates, and later Donald was Arthur’s agent and continues to be involved with his estate. I was thrilled because I have been a big Arthur Ashe fan for a long time,” Carlson says. “The idea of creating a brand dedicated to his legacy — akin to Lacoste or Fred Perry — was unbelievably exciting. We had lots of conversations with Donald and Jeanne and really developed the brand together, along with Karl who joined us from Kith.”

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It’s an impressive, comprehensive debut for a…well, let’s call it a legacy brand, albeit one that didn’t exist less than a month ago. There are printed polos and sweaters, sweatsuits and sweat bands, shorts and lots of socks. Stuff you could wear to play tennis or to lunch, because the preppy, sort of sporty stuff tennis players normally wear is pretty trendy right now.

“Arthur Ashe had impeccable style, [an] attention to detail and [a] sense of color. His career spanned the ‘60s, when his look was very clean-cut and collegiate, and the ‘70s, when he has a little more flash and flare,” Carlson says. “In the collection, we try to capture all of that. We didn’t want to simply replicate Ashe’s wardrobe, but rather to create something for today that reflects his style. We did, however, riff on certain key pieces: the U.S.A. warm-up he wore for the Wimbledon prize ceremony after shocking the world to defeat Jimmy Connors in 1975; and the black and white ‘grid’ mesh tennis shirt he frequently wore in the ‘70s.”

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For the new things designed to “reflect his style,” Carlson studied the star and tapped those close to him for tips and seldom repeated stories. This is all part of his usual design sessions, though, which begin “by studying the past very carefully.”

“In this case,” Carlson explains, “that was a lot of reading, watching matches, watching interviews, looking at photos, and talking with Jeanne, Donald and others.”

For tennis fans, this is a stylish new brand to support, with built-in lore from a bygone era. But it’s more than a one-off licensing deal, if you will. There’s real potential here, from the clever branding and logo work to the Supreme-like patterns. Maybe one day Arthur Ashe will sponsor a professional player. Could the brand be integrated somewhere inside Arthur Ashe Stadium? At the very least, it’s raising money for worthy causes.

For now, Arthur Ashe is content with its partnership with musician Aminé, who acts as an ambassador for the brand.

“The aesthetic and the look of tennis clothes is always going to be attractive tom me. Partnering with Arthur Ashe, it just felt kind of natural. It didn’t feel forced,” he tells Gear Patrol. “I get hit up a lot by different brands in different situations about different things they have going on, and it always kind of felt regurgitated in a way. When Arthur Ashe came to me, it felt a bit more unique — it felt like it had purpose; it felt a bit more unique; it felt like it had purpose; it felt like it had history.”

Above all else, he says, he was attracted to Arthur Ashe because it’s a brand with a distinct identity.

“The product always has to be good, but it’s the people, the people working there, that are really important to me,” he says. Those carrying on his legacy are cut from the same cloth, and he’s happy to support Black firsts in any way he can. “For me, it’s more just black culture, too. Someone being the first Black anything is always going to be important to me.”

The estate was happy to welcome Aminé to the metaphorical team. More than just fashionable (and talented or well-known), he’s authentic — and he supports their vision.

“This brand launch means is the continuation of something great that Arthur Ashe started a long time ago,” Blanchard says. By building a relationship with the estate, he says, they “hope to continue building on Ashe’s vision, legacy, and inspiration.”

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