First Published: 2nd September 2026, written by Olivia Doonan | Last Updated on 3rd September 2026 | Reviewed and Edited by Chloe Safilo
Padel used to borrow much of its wardrobe from tennis. Now fashion brands want the court, the shop, the café and the membership list.
On 15th and 16th August 2026, the Northern Broadwalk of the Sydney Opera House became a glass-walled padel arena. The event combined elite competition with fashion, wellness, food, live entertainment and a harbourside afterparty. Gucci hosted a private event around the tournament, while Waldorf Astoria introduced a temporary Racquet Club concept. It looked less like a conventional sporting fixture and more like a fashion-and-hospitality launch with a scoreboard.
That weekend captured where padel culture is heading.
The clothes still matter, of course. So do the rackets, bags and trainers. But the biggest fashion opportunity is no longer limited to what players wear. Brands are moving into the entire environment around the game: members’ clubs, branded courts, pro shops, cafés, social events and post-match spaces.
In Britain, the audience is already substantial. The LTA reported in May 2026 that one million adults and juniors were playing padel across 1,825 courts at 551 venues. At the end of 2025, annual participation had more than doubled from the previous year.
Padel fashion is becoming more than another activewear category. It is becoming a lifestyle business.
What does padel fashion mean now?
Padel fashion includes the clothes and footwear associated with the sport, but it now stretches into equipment, club merchandise, venue design, retail, hospitality, membership and events.
That creates several ways for a fashion company to enter the game.
| Model | What it involves | Example |
| Padel-native brand | Building clothing and community specifically around the sport | Pulco, Cuera |
| Product collaboration | Combining fashion direction with established equipment expertise | Kith Ivy for Wilson |
| Official club partnership | Placing uniforms, products and branding inside an existing venue network | EA7 x Rocket Padel |
| Branded padel venue | Joining courts, retail, food, events and community inside one destination | Golden Goose Arena |
| Mass-market capsule | Taking padel imagery and clothing to a wider high-street audience | M&S x Club de Padel |
These are not simply different versions of the same clothing launch. Each gives the brand control over a different part of the customer experience.
A padel-native label starts with the player. A collaboration starts with the product. A club partnership starts with access to an existing community. A branded arena goes further by turning the venue itself into a permanent campaign.
Why fashion brands want padel players
The International Padel Federation’s 2025 report put the number of active players above 35 million, with 77,300 courts spread across 150 countries and 20 dependent territories. Europe accounted for the largest share of players in separate FIP data published during 2025.
Yet participation figures explain only part of fashion’s interest.
Padel is usually played in doubles on a compact, enclosed court. Players constantly communicate with partners, rotate through social games and stand close to spectators. The glass walls also make the action, clothing, equipment and perimeter branding easy to see. The LTA identifies that collaborative format and close interaction as major reasons for the sport’s social appeal.
For a brand, the result is a series of recurring touchpoints:
Book a court. Attend coaching. Meet other players. Browse the pro shop. Stay for coffee. Join an event. Return the following week.
Compare that with buying a logo placement at a one-day event. A club can expose the same customer to the brand repeatedly, while the customer is actively participating in the culture the clothes are supposed to represent.
Streetwear has always drawn power from physical communities: skate spots, music venues, football terraces and city neighbourhoods. Padel offers fashion another place where identity can form around a shared activity.
Golden Goose turned the venue into the campaign
Golden Goose Arena in Milan is the clearest example of the full clubhouse model.
The CityLife venue brings together indoor and outdoor padel, a shop selling limited-edition sneakers and technical clothing, an outdoor après-padel bar, an indoor café, a lounge and a co-working area. Golden Goose also offers a community-based STAR Experience linked to the arena.
That combination gives the brand far more than court-side visibility.
The shop connects the activity directly to product. The bar and café extend the visit beyond the match. The lounge and co-working area make the venue relevant even when members are not playing. Everything sits inside the same visual world.
During Milan Design Week in April 2026, Golden Goose pushed the idea further. Artist Sofia Elias transformed the outdoor courts into an installation using mirrored transparent surfaces and sound. The day combined padel matches with talks, workshops and art before ending with DJ sets from Carista and DJ Spiller.
The court became an event space, content set and retail destination at the same time.
This is a significant shift from the usual fashion-sports collaboration. Golden Goose did not simply dress a player or produce a branded racket. It created somewhere customers could enter the brand physically, then gave them reasons to stay.
Kith Ivy joined the club and collection
Kith took a similar idea to New York, although with a more exclusive members’ club model.
Unveiled in September 2025, Kith Ivy was presented in two connected forms: a full-service padel and wellness club in the West Village, and a luxury lifestyle label designed around sport and leisure. The club concept included rooftop padel courts, a pro shop, dining from Café Mogador, an Erewhon tonic bar and a wellness centre.
Wilson supplied the sporting credibility. The Kith Ivy for Wilson collection covered men’s and women’s performance clothing, footwear, rackets, bags, balls and accessories. Kith then extended the aesthetic off court through knit polos, jackets, crewnecks, T-shirts and other lifestyle pieces.
The collection’s visual language is recognisably Kith. Greco-Roman artwork, laurel-style motifs, knitwear and traditional racquet-club references sit alongside modern technical materials. It borrows from tennis heritage without looking like a conventional tennis line.
That matters because padel still lacks one universally recognised uniform. Kith did not attempt to invent a completely unfamiliar look. Instead, it combined the polished codes of a traditional club with the streetwear-shaped world Ronnie Fieg has already built.
The product and venue support each other. The club gives the collection context, while the clothes give membership a visible identity.
It is a strong creative proposition, but also a highly controlled one. Kith Ivy’s members-only positioning raises a wider question about the direction of padel culture: can a sport promoted for its accessibility retain that identity when some of its most visible spaces are built around private membership and luxury consumption?
EA7 entered the British clubhouse
Fashion companies do not need to build an arena or operate a members’ club to access the same audience.
In March 2025, Rocket Padel named EA7 Emporio Armani as its official apparel partner. Coaches and staff received co-branded uniforms, EA7 products entered Rocket’s pro shops, and the partnership extended to entrances, net posts, centre courts, lightboxes and the glass walls at its Battersea Power Station venue.
This gives EA7 several roles inside the same club.
The staff uniform shows the clothing in use. The pro shop creates a point of sale. The court branding keeps the name visible throughout a match and in the photos or videos players share afterwards.
Rocket supplies the venues and regular players; EA7 supplies the products and visual identity around them.
This approach may prove easier to scale than constructing a branded club from scratch. A fashion company can work across several existing venues without taking on property development, coaching operations, food service and the rest of the leisure business.
It also fits the British market. As padel moves from novelty to regular habit, club partnerships place clothing in front of people who already play rather than hoping a general fashion campaign will turn them into players.
Pulco and Cuera are building padel from the inside
Luxury brands arrive with recognition. Sportswear giants arrive with distribution and years of product development. Padel-native labels must build credibility without either advantage.
Pulco is one of the most interesting British examples.
Founded by Joe Middleton, formerly president of Levi’s EMEA and chief executive of Canterbury, the London-designed label uses a more urban and street-influenced look than traditional tennis clothing. Its range combines playing shirts and shorts with hoodies, jackets and other pieces intended to continue beyond the court.
In 2025, Pulco became the first specialist padel apparel brand stocked at Harrods. The department store still carries items including playing tops, shirts and shorts, giving the label a level of luxury-retail visibility that would have been difficult to imagine for a British padel brand only a few years earlier.
The Harrods placement is culturally important even without disclosed sales figures. It moves padel clothing from the club pro shop into one of Britain’s best-known fashion destinations.
Cuera is following a more community-led route. The Scandinavian label describes itself as a padel brand built around movement, connection and ambition. Its 2026 partnership with Danish operator PadelPadel combines apparel with club presence and Cuera Open events.
That proximity to players can be an advantage. A specialist label can test products through coaches, ambassadors and regular club customers, then use tournaments and social sessions to build recognition.
The challenge is scale. Padel-native brands must show that they offer more than a new logo for familiar tennis or gym clothing. They need distinctive design, useful product details or a community strong enough to make the name mean something.
Padel has three competing dress codes
There is no single padel aesthetic yet. Three broad directions are emerging.
The racquet-club revival
Kith Ivy represents the polished version: knit polos, pleated silhouettes, crests, laurel graphics and tailored layers. It draws from tennis, Ivy League style and private-club imagery, then filters those references through modern streetwear.
This is padel as an aspirational members’ sport. The outfit is meant to make sense at the tonic bar as well as on the court.
Urban technical sportswear
Pulco takes a less nostalgic approach. Its minimal graphics, performance materials, relaxed layers and darker metropolitan styling aim to give padel a look separate from traditional tennis whites.
This is closer to contemporary running and cycling culture, where specialist performance products have become part of the everyday city wardrobe.
Retro club merchandise
At the more accessible end of the market, padel is also becoming a graphic theme.
M&S launched a children’s collaboration with Club de Padel in April 2026. The range includes colour-blocked sportswear, sweatshirts, polos, caps and graphic T-shirts carrying club-style logos and racket imagery.
The collection is not attempting to solve every technical requirement of the sport. It treats padel as a recognisable lifestyle reference in the same way fashion has long borrowed from baseball, motorsport, rugby and varsity athletics.
That may be one of the clearest signs that the culture is spreading. When a sport’s graphics begin appearing on clothing intended for people who may not yet play it, the visual identity has travelled beyond the court.
Can an accessible sport survive a luxury image?
Padel’s governing bodies frequently promote it as sociable, quick to learn and suitable for people across ages and abilities. That inclusiveness is part of its appeal.
Fashion often pulls in the other direction.
Members-only clubs, premium sportswear, luxury retail placements and designer events can make the game feel more exclusive. None of those things prevents community clubs or public courts from thriving, but they can shape how the sport is perceived.
The danger is not that luxury brands have entered padel. Fashion investment can improve venues, attract attention and fund ambitious events. The risk is that the premium version becomes the only version visible in campaigns.
A beginner should not feel that they need a private membership, £100 playing shirt and perfectly coordinated racket bag before they belong.
M&S’s children’s range offers a useful counterpoint to Kith Ivy and Golden Goose. It brings padel imagery into mainstream British retail at accessible price points. Meanwhile, FIP reported in June 2025 that women represented around 40 per cent of amateur players worldwide, reinforcing the need for brands to design for a broad, active customer base rather than a narrow luxury stereotype.
Fashion can make padel more visible. It can also make the culture feel harder to enter. The brands with the strongest long-term position may be those that create desire without turning participation into a dress-code test.
Does padel really need its own clothing?
Not every garment described as padel wear is technically unique.
LTA guidance says players can wear comfortable activewear and trainers. It identifies useful features such as stretch, breathability and moisture management, but those qualities are already familiar across tennis, gym and running apparel. The LTA also notes that much of the clothing needed for padel overlaps with tennis.
A specialist product should therefore explain what it does differently.
That could mean deeper ball pockets, a cut that stays comfortable during low defensive movement, better shoulder freedom for overhead shots or material selected for hot enclosed courts. In footwear, court surface, grip, fit and lateral stability may matter more than the sport written on the box.
Padel fashion does not always require technical novelty. A sweatshirt can belong to the culture because it represents a club, event or community. Performance clothing faces a higher bar: it should identify the problem it has been designed to solve.
The padel label alone is not the innovation.
The strategy is visible. The financial return is not
The current launches show that brands see opportunity in padel. They do not yet prove that every branded club or collaboration will make money.
Most public announcements describe facilities, products and creative ambition. They rarely disclose pro-shop conversion, clothing sales per member, repeat purchases, membership renewal or the effect of branded events on future court bookings.
Those are the numbers that would establish whether the clubhouse is a genuine commercial engine.
Golden Goose can show that a venue combines sport, retail and hospitality. Kith can demonstrate that a members’ club and collection were designed together. EA7 can document its visibility across Rocket Padel’s clubs. Sydney showed that padel can support a premium fashion-and-entertainment event.
What remains unclear is how effectively those touchpoints convert attention into durable customer value.
The strategy makes sense. The balance sheet has yet to catch up with the imagery.
What happens next?
Most fashion companies will not build their own padel arenas. Partnership is the more likely route.
Expect more club-specific capsules, coach uniforms, branded social leagues, tournament merchandise and temporary retail inside existing venues. Hotel and resort collaborations are another natural step. The growth of specialist padel holidays already brings accommodation, court access and post-match leisure into one travel experience; club capsules and destination-specific merchandise would be a logical extension.
Padel-native labels may also become acquisition targets or technical partners for larger companies that want credibility without starting from zero.
Athlete and creator partnerships will matter too. As more recognisable players emerge, brands will gain personalities through whom they can tell product stories rather than relying entirely on clubs and architecture.
The market will probably divide rather than settle on one winner. Luxury brands will build aspiration. Sportswear companies will compete through technical credibility and reach. Specialist labels will use community and product focus. High-street retailers will turn padel into a familiar visual code.
That mix is what makes the category interesting.
Padel fashion no longer describes one look, or even one type of customer. The old question was what players should wear.
The new question is who gets to shape the world around the court.
Further Reading
