When she won her fifth Wimbledon title, in 2012, Williams accented her white dress with a headband, wristbands and undershorts in magenta. Williams’s opponent in the final, Agnieszka Radwanska, wore black undershorts. Victoria Azarenka, Williams’s semifinal opponent, wore undershorts that were bright blue. Marion Bartoli won last year’s women’s final while wearing a beige headband.

One of the tipping points for the rule change might have come last year, when Federer wore white shoes with orange soles for his first-round match. Tournament officials told him that the color was too much and that he had to change his shoes for the next match.

Tennis whites became a phenomenon in the late 1800s to prevent the appearance of unseemly sweat stains as the sport became increasingly popular at social gatherings.

“One problem which simply had to be addressed very early on was that of perspiration,” Valerie Warren wrote in “Tennis Fashion: Over 125 Years of Costume Change.” “As increased skill at the game led to more movement on court, this in turn led to the dreaded problem of perspiration causing the appearance of embarrassing damp patches on colored fabrics. It was quite unthinkable that a lady should be seen to perspire!”

Wearing white at Wimbledon was a matter of tradition, not stipulation, for the next six decades.

Ted Tinling, a British player who pioneered fashions in women’s tennis after his retirement, made one of the first introductions of color at Wimbledon in 1947 when he sewed short trims of light blue and pink onto the hems of dresses for the British player Joy Gannon.

In his memoir “Sixty Years in Tennis,” Tinling recalled the uproar caused by a similar dress he made for Betty Hilton the next year when she played in the Wightman Cup, a team competition held at Wimbledon. Hazel Wightman, the namesake of the event and a matriarchal figure in American tennis in that era, objected to the intrusion of color and even suggested that Hilton had lost because she was “self-conscious about the color on her dress.”