Inside Graphite, a new kind of tennis archive
A vintage archive and creative agency built on decades of tennis clothing—and a frustration with how the sport presents itself now.
Bryson Malone is the rare stylish person who doesn’t want to overstate his fashion cred.
“I’m more like an anthropologist,” he told me as we dissected the differences between capital-F fashion and innate style. “When I’m at a tennis match, I’m looking at people in the stands to see what they’re wearing and how they’re interacting.”
What catches his eye? Not the influencers who spent hours getting ready, but the older tennis fans who dress “like they’re on a safari” or wear a clash of multicolored prints. “I love that so much,” he said.
That same impulse has driven his lifelong obsession with collecting vintage clothing—a hobby that’s now the foundation for his new business, Graphite, launching in May. The multifaceted company will sell curated collections of vintage tennis (or tennis-inspired) clothing that run the gamut from Ted Tinling dresses and Armani suits to small-town tennis tournament t-shirts whose design language Malone loves. It will also operate as a rental house for stylists and costume designers—where the rarest of pieces will live—and a creative agency helping tennis brands build more culturally relevant campaigns (sorely needed).
An art director and photographer for companies like Patagonia, Almine Rech, and Huckberry, Malone grew up on “the poor side” of Marin County, where he and his family mostly shopped at Goodwill and church thrift shops. “I grew up digging through things, and because Marin is generally a wealthy area, you’d find all these hand-me-downs from brands like Ralph [Lauren],” he said. “I had this weird window into a rich place, but as a total outsider.”
His love of tennis followed a similar track. He grew up playing at a tennis club that he got free access to because his dad worked as a massage therapist there on the side of his work in the restaurant business. “I’ve taken like one private lesson in my whole life,” he laughed. Nevertheless, he got the bug, and still hits the public courts three times a week.
It wasn’t until the last decade that he began collecting tennis-specific pieces. “I was always collecting and watching tennis from afar, and it just wasn’t satisfying my love for the sport,” he said.
In 2022, he was doing a shoot in New York for a friend when he met the stylist Sam Herzog, who was starting Systemarosa—whose business model is similar to Graphite’s but focused on soccer apparel. “I told her, ‘That’s so sick, I’ve always wanted to do that with tennis,’ and she was like, ‘You should!’” Malone explained. But he had recently gone freelance after working full-time at Huckberry and was “massively broke,” so it didn’t seem realistic.
It lodged itself in the back of his mind, though, and when a big check from a client came through last year, he amped up his collecting. “I basically bought to the point where I had to do something about it—I forced my own hand,” he said, noting that he now has roughly 3,000 pieces in his archive.
Herzog was super supportive and even styled the brand’s launch imagery, a lookbook merging pieces from different eras and price points in the same way most of us get dressed. Malone also brought on Zander and Simon Abranowicz—the founders of the design studio Abbreviated Projects—as partners so that Graphite can offer the brands it plans to work with a full-service creative suite, from photo art direction to graphic design.
While most of the collections it sells will be tightly themed, the first will be roughly 50 pieces that capture the breadth of the archive—suits, t-shirts, accessories, and tennis-themed home goods like fancy lighters and bookends. Future themes will include Smoking Section—with pieces from cigarette companies like Virginia Slims, Marlboro and Camel who have a long history in tennis; the Asia Edit, with tennis-inspired pieces from designers like Issey Miyake, Seiko watches, and memorabilia from the Asian Swing; a back-to-school American Prep collection; vintage suiting, and so on.
“I’m not trying to go mass, like get a bunch of customers and be a vintage reseller,” said Malone. “But these collections are a way for the non-creative class to buy into the brand and into tennis culture.”
Other vintage tennis apparel resellers like Vintage Court Collection, Frankie Collective, and Ace the Moon focus heavily on casual pieces from the ‘90s and early 2000s. While there’s certainly a market for that—and Malone has a ton of t-shirts from that era as well—it’s refreshing to have someone focused on the many decades of tennis style that came before Nike released its Challenge Court line.
“That’s not a part of tennis culture I want to ignore, but it’s oversaturated right now,” explained Malone.
The styling also stands out in a sea of cliche interpretations of tennis culture—lithe models in pleated skirts posing with wooden rackets, $200 sweatshirts emblazoned with fake tennis club emblems, or guys posing in front of luxury cars in Monte Carlo in sweatsuits. “It’s so costume-y,” he said.
What’s far more interesting to Malone are the real, unfiltered folks who play tennis, like the 50-year-olds he hits with who smoke cigarettes in between games. People who play tennis because they love the game, not the scene bubbling up around it.
“The normal people of tennis are just so fucking wonderful,” he said. “They don’t have capital-S style, but they have a style, and that inspires me so much more.”
Graphite is in many ways an effort to remind people that tennis can be a source of inspiration in ways that transcend its country club associations. Although tennis participation and viewership have grown in recent years—and with that, brand activity—Malone believes interest from fashion and cultural communities is still lacking.
“Style is now inherent to sports like basketball, but tennis hasn’t really bred that,” he said. “I mean look at the ‘tunnel walks,’ that’s the worst thing to happen to tennis in a long time. How do you make Frances Tiafoe look bad?”
Ultimately, the tennis tours can’t just manufacture cool. It has to come from the culture in and around the sport.
Malone points out that for a company like Graphite to succeed, he doesn’t need buy-in from the pro tours or their players. “That’s not a great sign, because if we don’t need you guys to be culturally relevant, you have no power,” he said.
By working with brands, however, Malone and his partners will have the opportunity to shape the modern language of tennis fashion and marketing in a way that could shift tennis’s cultural cachet in the right direction. That kind of reset feels long overdue.
A giveaway for paid subscribers:
We’re teaming up with Graphite to give away a vintage Tiffany & Co. porcelain tennis ball keepsake box from the ’90s—perfect for stashing jewelry or matches.
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Thank goodness this came into my feed; tennis! Style! Second-hand! All my favorite things.
👏love this!