Lonsdale (brand)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Lonsdale (disambiguation)
Lonsdale is a clothing company founded in London, England in 1960, producing boxing equipment before branching out into sports and fashion clothing.
It is presently a division of Sports World International.
[edit] History
Lonsdale receives its name from the eponymous Hugh Cecil Lowther, fifth Earl of Lonsdale. Lord Lonsdale organised boxing matches in 1909 and 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 1979, Paul Weller of the band The Jam started wearing Lonsdale-T-shirts, and inspired non-athletes to wear the clothing. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lonsdale clothing particularly found favour with skinheads and mod revivalists.
A division of Lonsdale produces football kits for Sunderland, Birmingham City, Brentford, Swindon Town, Millwall, and Blackburn Rovers. The deal with Blackburn Rovers was extended at the start of the 2005/06 season, so that they not only were the club's kit manufacturer, but also the club's kit sponsor.
In the Netherlands and Germany, the term Lonsdale youth became a widely used synonym for teenagers with extreme right wing tendencies, sometimes associated with the gabber subculture. A website, Lonsdalenews, has been set up to track racist incidents in that country. 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.
