Lonsdale (clothing)
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- For other uses, see Lonsdale (disambiguation)
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Lonsdale is a clothing company founded in London, England in 1960, producing boxing equipment before branching out into sports and fashion clothing. As of 2007, it is a division of Sports Direct.
The company is named after Hugh Cecil Lowther, fifth Earl of Lonsdale, who organised boxing matches in 1909 and who was president of the National Sporting Club of Britain. Every boxer who became a champion and defended his title successfully three times received the Lonsdale belt. Bernard Hart, an ex-boxer, visited the Lord in the 1960s and asked for permission to use his name for a clothing brand targeted towards boxers. Lonsdale articles have been worn by many famous boxers, including Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Henry Cooper and Lennox Lewis.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Lonsdale clothing became popular among skinheads and mod revivalists. Paul Weller of the band The Jam was a particularly high-profile aficionado. Since then, the brand has seen a drop in quality and an increase in popularity, following a takeover by Mike Ashley in 2003.
Lonsdale sponsored Blackburn Rovers Football Club during the 2005-06 season. As of 2007, a division of Lonsdale produces football kits for Brentford, Swindon Town and Millwall. In 2008 Lonsdale are the official clothing suppliers to the Sydney Roosters Rugby League club in Australia.
In the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, the term Lonsdale youth became a widely used synonym for teenagers with extreme right wing tendencies, sometimes associated with the gabber subculture.[1][2] A website, Lonsdalenews, has been set up to track racist incidents in the Netherlands.[3] Right-wing extremists have liked tops bearing the Lonsdale logo, allegedly because a carefully placed jacket can leave only the letters NSDA showing; one letter short of NSDAP, the German language acronym for Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Lonsdale reacted to this development by sponsoring anti-racist events and campaigns, and by refusing to deliver products to known neo-Nazi retailers. In 2003, the "Lonsdale Loves All Colours" campaign was launched, emphasizing non-white fashion models. Subsequently, the popularity of Lonsdale clothing among the far right dropped. The brand Consdaple was founded by a German far right politician in imitation of Lonsdale, to supply neo-Nazis with clothing that displays the full "NSDAP" acronym.
