Pat Rafter's next act
Twenty-two years after retiring from professional tennis, the Aussie icon is trying his hand at something completely out of his comfort zone: fashion
By Amy Campbell
RECENTLY, PAT RAFTER had a funny exchange with a stranger. He was playing a padel match on the Gold Coast – the former world number one has found a second career in the sport – when a man came up to him carrying a very colourful striped polo shirt.
“I started cracking up laughing,” says Rafter. “It was this technicolour shirt I wore in the 1995 Australian Open. It was pretty loud and out-there; I thought it was pretty cool. He just brought it up to me, and I was like, ‘Where did you get that?’ I think he’d had it since then, which would be almost 30 years.”
Rafter wore the green, blue, purple and red striped shirt in his fourth-round defeat to Andre Agassi, who wore a similarly of-the-moment ensemble: a maroon-and-white striped polo shirt with a chequerboard collar, a paisley bandana in matching tones and, of course, his pirate-like earring. “That was the fashion,” says Rafter, dialling in from his home near Byron Bay. “I don’t know why, but that’s what we wore.”
But the greatest barometer of tennis fashion throughout Rafter’s illustrious career wasn’t colour or headgear (though his samurai bun was iconic – more on the origins of that shortly). “It was all about the collar,” he says. “Especially in the mid-’90s, you were very limited in what you could wear. And then towards the end of the ’90s, it became, ‘Oh, is that a collar?’ The fabric around the neck area thickened up a bit. And then the collars eroded away, and I think by the end of my career, in the early 2000s, the collar was pretty much gone. Now you see the cut-off sleeves and singlets and all sorts of things. So, the fashion has changed quite a bit.”
Though he insists fashion is outside of his wheelhouse, Rafter certainly has a good grasp of what was hot, and what was not. While he doesn’t regret it, looking back, the button-up shirt he wore throughout Wimbledon in 2000 falls into the latter category. “God, it was baggy,” he laughs. “I think I had to readjust it after every single shot.” But now, decades after making the aforementioned statements, Rafter is dipping his toes back into the world of style by partnering with two of his mates, former professional freeskier Dave Keam and retail marketing expert James Gourley, on a racquet-inspired fashion brand called Rallee.
“I’ve decided to have a bit of a crack and step outside my comfort zone,” says the two-time US Open winner. “And it’s not your run-of-the-mill stuff. We’re having a go, thinking outside the box. Fashion isn’t necessarily me, but it ties in well with racquet sports.”
Rafter’s entry point into the brand was its original logo t-shirt. He was taken with its comfort and cut, a solid testimonial from someone who’s sweated through a fair few tees in his time. “I wore it, and I thought, Bloody hell, that’s really comfortable. “It doesn’t feel like a tennis shirt or a sporting shirt. It just feels like a nice comfortable everyday shirt. I wanna wear it on the court; I wanna wear it at the airport, going places or cruising around. Whatever I’m doing, I wear it.”
While Rallee started with a t-shirt, a few caps and monogrammed socks, just in time for summer the trio behind the brand are dropping an expanded range, full of retro-inspired gear that’s just as functional as it is fashionable. The aesthetic is ’70s-inspired – the era of John McEnroe, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Rafter’s all-time style icon, Björn Borg.
“Björn Borg’s the man,” he declares. “The headband, the stripes, his swagger. I know they wore bloody tight shorts back in those days. They would’ve been uncomfortable as hell. But the shirts, the look, his long hair, his headband . . . he was just the ultimate.”
While Rallee’s summer 2024/2025 range doesn’t include shorts quite so snug, the collection’s green-and-white colour theme and ‘summer of love’ mood certainly nods to that decade of tennis style. But Rallee isn’t just for rallying in. “It’s not necessarily looking like you’re wearing sports attire, but it’s still very practical for sports,” Rafter says. “But then also, you can go down to the pub straight afterwards and have a drink while not feeling like you’re out of place.”
You can expect to see Rafter sporting the brand when he returns to the Australian Open for the event’s Australian Padel Open, which held its inaugural edition back in January. Not only did he compete, the 51-year-old was the founding ambassador of Padel Australia, going on to represent the country at the Senior World Padel Championships in Alicante, Spain. Today, he’s padel-obsessed; the work he’s doing promoting the sport has, no doubt, contributed to its surge in popularity, which we get to the bottom of on page 38. “Padel is very different to tennis, and that’s what intrigued me about the game. It’s lots of learning, which I enjoy. It’s the way my mind works.”
Watching Rafter compete in padel is just as entertaining as seeing him on a full-size court, with the ball ricocheting off the glass walls in every direction. Just today, he’s man bun-less – he did away with the style after retiring, but looks back on it with amusement.
“It actually started as a piss-take,” he admits. “Myself and [Mark] Philippoussis were playing a doubles tournament, I think it was 1997 in Cincinnati, and we both had longish hair. And we said, ‘Let’s go out with these pineapple styles on our heads’. We looked like two gooses, but we didn’t care.
“But then it was like, Hang on, this might stick. So, I flowed that into the US Open, it got a little bit longer and I was able to pull it back. I couldn’t quite bring it up all the way into a ponytail, so that’s why I turned it into the samurai style. It stuck and became kind of synonymous with my look.
“It was more just having fun; it wasn’t really on purpose. And for my personality, too, it didn’t really fit in with me – I’m not one of those ‘out-there’ sort of guys. I keep things pretty conservative. But for some reason, it felt pretty good.”
When you consider the man bun-touting champions who came after him – Roger Federer circa 2003, Marcos Baghdatis in the mid-2010s, the half-bun Stefanos Tsitsipas has had on and off for the last few years – it’s possible Rafter has made more of a statement than he thinks. And with the popularity of tenniscore soaring in tandem with the global rise of tennis-adjacent sports, and Rallee tapping into this zeitgeist – who knows? The bun, baggy shirts and colourful stripes may not be Rafter’s only lasting style legacy.
Related:
