About — Eastwood Athletics

Most people who play tennis every week own two kinds of tennis clothing, and wear neither of them anywhere else.

The first kind is engineered. Seamless, laser-cut, printed in a colour that appears nowhere else in the wearer's life. It works — it will get you through a third set in August without complaint — and it announces, from thirty feet, that you have just come off a court. The second kind looks right. It is cotton, it belongs to a photograph taken in 1974, and it is soaked through by the middle of the second set.

Eastwood is the space between those two. That gap is narrower than it sounds and considerably harder to build in than either side of it.

The whole afternoon, not the ninety minutes

Nobody here is designing for the tour. The tour has its own suppliers, its own laundry arrangements, and a requirement that its clothing photograph well at two hundred frames a second. None of that is our problem.

We design for the standing weekly game — the one that has been in the same slot for years, that nobody organises and nobody cancels, still booked under the name of somebody who moved abroad in 2019 and never got round to being taken off the system.

The match in the middle of it is maybe ninety minutes. The afternoon around it runs to four hours: standing court-side waiting for a fourth, retrieving balls while somebody works through the committee minutes at length, the drink afterwards that nobody has ever formally proposed. A shirt has to work for the ninety minutes. Everything else it does — how it reads at the bar, whether it survives being left in a car boot until Thursday — happens in the other two and a half hours, and we treat that as the same job rather than as a bonus.

A woman in a khaki sand heather sweatshirt standing court-side on a municipal blue and green hard court on a flat overcast morning — A municipal court on a flat morning. The match is the short part.

Decisions, not features

Every choice in a garment was made by somebody, and a surprising number of them were made to save eleven pence. Here are ours, and why.

Weight. Our warm-weather knits sit between 150 and 170 grams per square metre. Lighter fabric feels like performance on a hanger and behaves badly in the fourth game: it clings, and it goes translucent when wet. Heavier hangs off the shoulder instead of on it. It is an unglamorous band to sit in and we have never found a reason to leave it.

The shoulder. Flatlock seams throughout. A season is somewhere north of four thousand serves, and a raised overlocked ridge abrades the stitching and the person wearing it in roughly equal measure. It costs more per garment and it is invisible until about month five, which is exactly when it starts to matter.

The collar. Knitted as its own piece and then attached, never a strip of body jersey folded over and stitched down. Fold-over collars curl, and a curled collar retires a garment that is otherwise entirely fine.

Cuffs and hems. Ribbed, not hemmed, on everything that has them. A hemmed cuff goes slack inside a season and does not come back.

The layer afterwards. The Men's Performance Hoodie and the Women's Sweatshirt are the two heaviest things we make, on the grounds that the garment doing the most hours is the one you pull on once you have stopped moving. The hoodie is a pebble knit with raglan sleeves, so nothing is cut across the shoulder, and no front pocket — a kangaroo pocket on a court is somewhere to lose a ball. The sweatshirt is brushed-back fleece, cut slightly short and boxy with a dropped shoulder, which is the shape that sits over the shirt underneath instead of arguing with it.

An olive green heather hooded sweatshirt and a plain white performance tee folded over a weathered bench at the edge of a red clay court — A cuff and a collar are the two cheapest places to save money, and the last two anybody checks.

Five garments

Men's Performance Tee, $68. Men's Performance Hoodie, $128. Women's Performance Shirt, $72. Women's Sweatshirt, $128. Kids' Tee, $42 — which a child will grow out of long before they wear it out, and that is the correct way round for that particular garment to fail.

A child of about nine in a plain white kids' tee standing on an empty green all-weather court, holding a racket — The Kids' Tee, being grown out of at roughly the correct rate.

That is the line. Not the first drop of a line; the line.

Five colourways, and no seasonal additions to them: Pure White, Light Grey Heather, Pure Black, Olive Green Heather, Khaki Sand Heather. White, because most clubs still ask for some version of it. The three heathers, because a marl hides the first stage of the fade that a flat dye announces from the shoulders down, and because a heather reads as clothing rather than as kit. Black, because there has to be one thing in the drawer you can put on without making a decision.

There is no orange. There is not going to be an orange.

What we won't do

No spring collection and no autumn one. The tee we sell in April is the tee we sell in October, and in April after that. Nothing gets discontinued to make room for something newer. When a garment does change it will be because we found a better collar or a better knit, and we will say which.

Nothing is printed on the back. There is no fourth colourway of something that already has five, no lifestyle category, no away kit, no limited edition, no collaboration. The standard growth plan for an apparel brand is more styles, more drops, more reasons to come back in six weeks. That plan is available to us and we are not going to use it.

A shirt still in the bag in three years is worth more to us than four bought in one afternoon.

The mark on the chest is small and it stays small. If somebody wants to know where the shirt came from, they can ask.

The part that isn't ours

None of this is a philosophy. It is a short list of decisions, most of them arrived at by looking at garments that had failed and working backwards from the failure.

The rest of it — the Tuesday slot, the fourth who is always eight minutes late, the argument about a line call from six years ago that gets relitigated every spring — is not ours to design and never was. We are trying to be the part of it that nobody has to think about.