Introducing: Palmes. Palmes Tennis Society is a Danish menswear brand with its roots in tennis culture, bringing pieces to wear on and off the court.Palmes Tennis Society is a Denmark menswear brand with its roots in tennis culture, bringing pieces to wear on and off court. We spoke with the owner of Palmes, Nikolaj Hansson, about his views on Palmes and tennis culture. Below, read all about the tennis passion that started to grow, and why he became enchanted with the sport.
Nikolaj:
"Ever since childhood, I’ve had a slightly obsessive approach to the things that I was into. I spent most of my youth skateboarding, devouring everything within that space, watching skate videos and reading the magazines of Thrasher, Slap, Transworld and whatever you could get your hands on in Denmark fifteen years ago. I’d played tiny bit of tennis while on family holidays on camping sites as a kid but had never really felt that tennis could be for me. It just never stuck with me, and I couldn’t recognise any of the things that I was into within the culture of tennis. The culture of tennis. It seemed very foreign to me.
Then came the pandemic, I’d gotten bored with running for the sheer purpose of exercise and missed hanging out with my friends. I made a group chat with some friends in it AND told them that I’d joined the local tennis courts and that they should join as well. We started playing without knowing the rules or anything, and I found myself falling entirely in love with it, leading me to dive into a rabbit hole of the sport and its surrounding culture across books, magazines, documentaries, and videos from iconic matches of the past. It gave me the same feeling as I had when I fell in love with skateboarding as a kid.
However, I realized that there wasn’t anything in the world of tennis that reflected the things that I was into, from art and architecture over industrial design and skateboarding. Sure, you had String Theory by David Foster Wallace which is arguably the greatest piece of tennis literature ever written and the Agassi biography is fucking sick too, but I wanted to DIG deeper than that. And that’s where the idea for Palmes arose — a menswear brand with roots in tennis culture for wearing on and off court, driven by the idea that tennis should be for the many; not the few.
Looking at tennis from a broader perspective, I think that a lot of people don’t think that the sport is for them because of how it’s always been presented in popular culture; a sport for the conservative and, at times, upper class, dominated by traditions and unwritten rules. The idea for Palmes is to show that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from when it comes to tennis; that you don’t have to fit into the traditional image of tennis in order to play and have fun with your friends. Instead, you should change and evolve tennis into whatever you want for it to be, for you and no one else.
Ultimately, Palmes is about passing this feeling of falling in love with tennis onto others and using our ethos to drive up awareness around the sport, pushing the culture forward into a forever modern and continuously evolving perspective. I mean, if I can just get one person to have the same feeling that I had of falling head-first in love with tennis, then that’s an insane thing and that’s what Palmes is here for."
Influenced by the tennis culture, the Palmes capsule covers everything from caps, balls and racket grips to polos and shirts. Go to our webstore to see the entire Palmes collection.
