Time to survey the fashion on show at the PDC World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace. Bizarre? Other-worldly? Downright impractical? Well, ostensibly. But it’s anestablished fact, of course, that what the darts players are wearing on the oche at Christmas, customers will be taking off the High Street rails a few months later.
Mark well, then. Generally speaking, collars this year are “Classic Soft” and zippering is under-stated, fleece-style and quarter-length. Designs are graphics-led and bold, and favoured colour-ways include orange and teal, jade and periwinkle… essentially, all the colours of the rainbow, albeit a rainbow after a nuclear disaster. It’s great to see.
In particular, the Peter “Snakebite” Wright collection has again been outstanding. This year’s illusion of a striped scarf, tossed nonchalantly over the shoulder, echoes previous Christmas-specific pieces from the mohawked Scotsman featuring wide, Santa-style belts.
Alas, too many players are happy to let their shirts do all the talking and allow their look to peter out from the waist down in what has disappointingly become the de rigueur work-wear for the competitive darter – a pair of unstructured dark leisure slacks. Not Wright, though, who deploys matching trousering to create a full-bodied effect, as in his bravely self-announcing “unripe lemon” outfit for Round One. We applaud him.
Oddly, Wright is the only player who dresses specifically for the walk-on, supplementing his stage outfits at this time of year with a pair of hairy Grinch gloves – impractical for dart-throwing, it’s true, which is why he eventually removes them, but very good for gesturing at the cameras on the way through.
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Generally, though, players are beginning their walk-ons already stripped for action, and darts does seem to be missing a dramatic costuming opportunity here. Many of us still recall the extravagant cape-use in the walk-on phase of the old BDO star Bobby George, who would occasionally accessorize his arrival outfit with a crown. But the BDO ended up struggling for relevance, so obviously that doesn’t always work out well.
Nonetheless, could we one day at least see boxing-style robing used in a PDC darts walk-on? Too late, maybe. What the likes of Leonard Gates and, in particular, Motomu “Motchi” Sakai now routinely bring to the walk-on in the way of energy and dancing would be implausible and possibly even dangerous in a dressing gown.
Nor can one imagine the sport going the way of Premier League football and introducing the “anthem jacket”, or “track-suit top” as it used to be known. Yet one wouldn’t be averse to seeing players holding back the eventual shirt-reveal by arriving in some kind of breathable, stretchy over-garment or “shrug”, which perhaps they could change out of behind a screen at the top of the steps up to the stage. Or they could always pop behind one of the Official PDC Darts Dancers, who would thereby gain an additional purpose beyond lending the event an oddly unreconstructed Seventies vibe. It’s something for the sport to think about, anyway.
Among the Ally Pally crowd, theming is having a moment. This season, when you spot someone who has come as Shrek, they are likely to be part of an organised tableau in which you won’t have to look much further to locate a Princess Fiona, a Donkey, and at least one Lord Farquaad. This is impressive co-ordination, clearly, although the saturation of the event by people dressed, in teams, as Wally from the “Where’s Wally?” books conceivably represents an existential crisis for that particular character. Certainly, Wally’s signature elusiveness – the trait which made his name, let’s not forget – is significantly under pressure when there are up to 14 of him seated at one table.
In terms of formal wear, John McDonald, the tournament’s MC, has probably been the only person in the building in a well-cut suit this past week, and has most definitely been the only person in the building adopting a crisply folded polka-dot pocket-square. This will likely change come the final, of course, when it’s traditional for the Sky Sports presenting team to dress up a bit. I’ll hazard, however, that few will be joining them. Formal just isn’t where darts is in 2025.
Photograph by Tim Ockenden/PA