If a tennis match is “a relationship”, as Zendaya’s character so romantically puts it in the first act of Challengers, then the film’s opening game can only be described as “a hate fuck”. Two suspiciously-close-friends turned sworn enemies rally on the baking clay of a backwater New York court. The grunts turn to yelps. The techno (poundingly brought to you by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) could soundtrack a club with a “clothes optional” policy. And the sweat. The sweat. It drips and pours and waterfalls across yards of honed flesh to become the silent fourth actor of Lucas Guadagnino’s hormonally-charged sports love triangle.
And where is all that sweat, energy and pent-up frustration stored? In the vest of Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig: the patron saint of fuck boys, the bringer of infidelity, the wrong’un that feels so right. The vest itself is early ‘00s sportswear at its finest. It is black, and there’s more than a hint of pseudo-galactic print in red and blue. It also sits in a Venn diagram of all that is scummy and desirable in the era of feet pic millionaires. There’s something quite secret-location-queer-rave about it; it’s athletic, but also a bit filthy; an item you might find on a bedroom floor after a 4am hookup with an Aussie on Ko Pha Ngan. But most importantly, it’s sexy without trying to be sexy. Much like TikTok’s ongoing fascination with the short shorts worn by oxen rugby boys, the horn is an unintentional byproduct of functional design, not the prime intention. The horn is but an occupational hazard.
Except, in the perma-semi world of Challengers, everything is intentional. Patrick Zweig is there to play mind games, and like all the most effectively noxious fuckboys, his intentions are elusive. Again, that’s repeated off-screen. The Impatto vest refuses to be Googled. There is no information, no replicas, no whiff of an incoming drop. Even the PR had very little information. And few described the mania more succinctly than GQ’s man on the ground in America, Sam Hine. In his sharp breakdown of the sudden mania around Josh O’Connor’s style, he admitted: “I for one am hesitant to admit how much time I spent last weekend scouring eBay for those long-out-of-style plaid shorts, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ techno soundtrack thumping in my headphones.” Like all the great lusts in history, this is getting to people, but not into peoples’ hands.
It’s well-documented that Jonathan Anderson, creative director of his namesake JW brand and Loewe, was charged with the costumes – and he set out to find some heat in the normalcy of the sport. “It’s just everyday wear, and it’s set in the world of competitive tennis. What I was obsessed about was that in America, Americans buy the brand,” he told W magazine in a joint interview with Guadagnino. “It’s McDonald’s; it’s Nike. And there are so many undercurrents in the business of being a tennis player.” One of them being hot.
The film’s boom has also coincided with a larger rethink of tennis in general. It’s not just for private schoolers with distant parents anymore. Nikolaj Hansson is arguably one of the sports’ great menswear gate-openers. He created his cult brand Palmes after turning from skateboarding to tennis during the lockdown, and blending the two into a sports-adjacent brand. “With the risk of sounding like an absolute dick, I think that tennis can be a refuge from the doom-scrolling, empty-calorie world that we sometimes find ourselves living in. Tennis doesn't come easy; you need to grind it out, to show up time and time again to get good at it,” he says. “With Palmes, we try to use tennis to change how we spend our time.” And he’s also acutely aware of the carnality of it all. “As a 29-year old, I think that insecurity factors in as well; but if you're ripping forehands up the line without a shirt on on a hot summer day, there isn't a soul who can tear your confidence down, you know?”
Compare the Impatto vest’s elusiveness to the ‘I Told Ya’ T-shirt, then. A fruit of the haute merch era, it serves as a symbol of the power dynamic on screen – and as a means to make cash off it. It’s been everywhere: on red carpets, on people who buy designer clothes in store, on JFK Jr. too, with the political progeny wearing it several times in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It’s also cool.
And yet in that heated, sweat drenched match of Challengers, the spectators cheer for Mike Faist’s Art: the good guy, the comeback king, the tennis white knight. But they long for Patrick Zweig, and the grot glam of a 24-hour sports vest.
