From John McEnroe’s views on the gender pay gap to who’s who in the royal box and how they have done their hair, the variables at Wimbledon are endless. But at one of the few sporting events that sells tickets to spectators on the day, there will always be one certainty: the Wimbledon queues.

The procedure is well established. On your arrival you are issued with a queue card, dated and numbered to show your position. You pitch your tent, eat (without using a barbecue), go to sleep, and are woken by stewards at 6am who ask you to dismantle your equipment and create a “tighter formation”. At 7.30am, wristbands are distributed. There’s a place for luggage, and plenty of rules – no vaping, no loo breaks over 30 minutes and absolutely no gazebos. Do not, at any point, remove your wristband.

Mention the word queue and most people balk. Because queues are boring – or, worse, punchlines, synonymous with etiquette and Britishness. They are surrounded by rules (don’t push in, one in one out, and so on) and sometimes more rigorous systems – some skatewear brands have embraced ticketing. One involves heading to a location on a Monday and putting your name down simply to get a queue spot several days in advance of an item going on sale. If, as Harvard academic Leo Mann explained in his 1962 essay Queue Culture, queues work best when they mimic a normal social system, imposing “cultural values of egalitarianism and orderliness”, then this social system feels borderline Gilead.

And yet, through choice or otherwise, we spend around 52 days of our life in line. These queues range from prosaic ones at the bank, in the supermarket or at airport security to sexier iterations for gig tickets, book signings, PlayStations, a new Warhammer piece, the latest iPhone release or, indeed, grasscourt tennis’s ultimate championship. In the last decade, another sort of queue has emerged; one that is less about the end result and more about the act itself. Queues to make friends in, and queues to be seen in.

The magic of the queue ... Harry Potter fans in Piccadilly await the latest instalment. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian

Recently, at Nike Town in central London, hundreds waited in line for the Nigeria football team’s home kit, which sold out in minutes. Around Christmas last year, 300-plus people queued outside a newsagent in west London to meet Virgil Abloh, the much-hyped head of menswear at Louis Vuitton, and then cover star of fashion magazine System. “It was all very pleasant, there was no trouble, no jumping the queue,” says the owner of Shreeji’s newsagent, Mr Sandeep. “It’s as if they wanted to be here, queueing.”

Sara McAlpine, then senior editor of System, organised the magazine signing that prompted the queue. For Abloh, she suggests, queueing is a two-way street. “Regardless of what people think of his ability as a designer, he’s a huge people person. Build the queue, and they will come, connect, and hey, they’ll whack the whole thing on Instagram,” she says.

The “fun” queue has long had a place in popular culture. According to Sex and the City, it’s where girls meet guys. In The Full Monty you can dance in them, even if you’re signing on. A new film, Studio 54, which charts the rise and fall of the 1970s New York nightclub’s founders, sees writer and socialite Anthony Haden-Guest discussing the queues outside as “seeing the damned looking into paradise”.

Fashion has co-opted this sort of line particularly well. At Gucci on Bond Street, there is often a six-deep queue outside their flagship store during busy times (the idea is to create a more one-on-one service, although insiders say having people outside has helped cultivate the brand’s cult status). Just as a logo on a T-shirt semaphores your allegiance with a particular brand or movement, joining the right queue signals you know that, say, Thursday is drop day (the day some labels choose to release new stock) or that Virgil Abloh is going to be in town. It’s a tactic borrowed from the world of streetwear. Long before the much-documented drops at Supreme and Palace, skate shops (and indeed surf shops if, like me, you grew up near the coast) doubled up as social spaces for young people. “The queue becomes an offline communal experience shared with fellow fans,” says Laura Saunter, insights editor with trend forecasters WGSN. “It’s about more than what they take home.” She adds: “The process of acquiring the item requires a certain amount of emotional investment, so waiting in lines all day can be a rewarding experience – even if they don’t buy anything.”

The queues outside Studio 54 in New York were like ‘the damned looking into paradise’. Photograph: Antoinette Norcia/Sygma via Getty Images

That Abloh chose a newsagent wasn’t accidental. While Shreeji has a carefully curated selection of magazines, a neighbourhood shop has a sense of community baked into its bricks. “Queues are community, with the opportunity for like-minded people to come together,” says McAlpine.

A New Yorker short story from 1974 entitled Come Down to Queue sums up the social aspect neatly, following two friends who bump into each other in a queue waiting to see The Exorcist. “Why do people do it?” asks one, referring to the act of watching such a film. Misunderstanding the question, the other replies with a quote from US sociologist David Riesman: “People standing around all day together get to meet each other and that way communicate.” Some queues will forever be dull. But others have the potential to be social, fun, quixotic, ripe with energy and atmosphere – and in 2018 to be documented on social media.

Gosha Rubchinskiy – a Russian designer whose limited-edition collections routinely draw queues – thinks these sorts of queues have become almost a social necessity. Speaking at Tbilisi fashion week in May, he said: “People have a longing to stand in line and meet one another and the occasion for that today is clothing ... I think this situation may be used to unite people.”

To Rubchinskiy, the fashion queue is a successor to the record-shop queue, where “20 years ago, they stood in lines at music stores ... and now they are waiting for a new release of sneakers or a new collection of their favourite brand”. At the January launch of the designer’s collaboration with Burberry at Dover Street Market, there was a queue round the block, but very few actual sales. “I can’t afford it,” said one boy, Simon, 14, who arrived with his friend. “But it’s cool for us to see it.” Those who actually wanted to buy headed to the Burberry shop on Regent Street, where there was no queue.

All about the moment ... outside H&M for the launch of the Balmain x H&M collection. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

Everyone has queued for something for a laughably large amount of time. Among my social circle, there’s the guy who queued for 12 hours for a Nintendo 64, a friend who queued for eight hours to see Duran Duran at Wembley Arena in 2004, another who queued for a burger at a new opening for four hours in the rain, and another who has queued for every single Harry Potter book. One friend in Japan admitted to queueing for two hours for ice-cream, adding: “I sometimes think the queue itself is the main event.”

Much of the modern queue’s rebranding can be credited to the restaurant scene, its derided “no-bookings” policy and the ensuing lines outside. For over eight years, says Russell Norman, the restaurateur behind queue-friendly restaurants Polpo and Spuntino, “I have taken the flak for restaurants and queues.” Initially they took reservations but it got busy quickly, “and people’s expectations were sky high – there is no way you can satisfy your customers”. So they got rid of evening bookings, attracting locals and passersby who came knowing full well they would have to wait but were catered for as they did so.

“I understand why people associate it with me, but waiting for a table is not new,” he says, citing the arrival of Barrafina in Soho in early 2007 and Wagamama in 1992. Trattoria Da Nennella, a popular local/tourist haunt in the back alleys of Naples, has become world famous for its social queueing system. The maitre’d takes your name, you wait in the street with the other punters making small talk perhaps with a spritz from the bar two doors down, and he shouts your name when the table is ready. The food is great, but the process is the real draw. In the catering world, drinking in queues is encouraged. “They call it servicing a queue,” says Norman, who later turned his basement dining room into a waiting bar. How else did we end up a nation of spritz drinkers?

Shoppers queue in Oxford Circus for a Topshop/Kate Moss collaboration. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Even on the high street, queueing is now an event. The famed H&M collaborations, which followed the Topshop/Kate Moss collection, and the Next Boxing Day sale, for which people queued overnight on the street, all created a mania that, while not exactly fun, was somehow magnetic. H&M’s 2015 collaboration with Balmain drew such an unprecedented crowd, the police were called to handle scuffles. People queued on Oxford Street from the day before, many of them first-timers, sometimes immediately re-selling the pieces for 250% of the original price on eBay or outside the shop. By the following day, those same pieces sold for the original price. It was all about the moment, the queue, and the thrill of the chase.

Some queues have taken on an almost religious parallel, the wait becoming a sedentary pilgrimage that involves sacrifice (time) and pain (sore feet), but ultimately a kind of communion. I admit I am not immune to this. In the week it was announced that Claire Ptak of Violet bakery in east London would be making the royal wedding cake, queues at the cafe grew exponentially. I should know – I queued for 40 minutes in the rain for a brownie. At the Paris launch of the Balmain x H&M collection, I ended up buying two T-shirts, actually running to the clothes rail to get them, even though I don’t like the label and – I have no idea where they are now. The last time I saw a similar level of hysteria was on queueing to see the interred remains of Saint Assisi in the Chiesa di San Francesco d’Assisi as a tourist in Italy. As the writer Howard Jacobson, who lives in the vicinity of one of these skate shops, surmises: “The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related, in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.”

Supreme queue in Soho ... it could be argue that by joining the queue you are working for free, giving up time to make someone’s brand look good. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Guardian

Queues may be a new social currency, but how healthy any of this is remains open to question. Attempts to co-opt human interaction as a means to sell is not unique to these shops, although they probably wouldn’t admit to it. As the saying goes of data-hungry services such as Facebook, you are the product. In a weird twist, it was reported in the New Yorker in 2013 that Supreme makes clothing that its employees doubt they will sell, which people having queued still buy. When you join one of these queues, although there by choice, it could be argued that you are working for free, giving up your time to make someone else’s brand look good.

At Wimbledon, the queues are fully sanctioned, even encouraged, by the club. As one of its chief stewards told the New York Times, “people are prepared to put themselves out [by queueing] and the club is very keen to see that this continues”. Last year’s heatwave saw queues reach record lengths, which suggests the same will happen this year. Because what could be more ingrained in our national psyche than standing in the heat, for Wimbledon, in a queue that comes with its own handbook?

• Do you have a happy, funny or otherwise memorable queueing experience? Tell us about it below ...