On Saturday morning, as the crowd in the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center waits for Naomi Osaka to walk out for her third-round match in the U.S. Open, the cheers are likely to begin long before she even emerges from the tunnel. Attendees have been thrumming with anticipation: not just about how each competition will go, but about what Osaka will wear.
No one has done more to change the game of tennis fashion this year than Osaka. At every Grand Slam she has raised the bar, and at the Open, the last major tournament of the year, it had become clear that this time around she was offering something of a grand finale.
Osaka wasn’t just unveiling a unique on-court Nike-designed look, as she, and tennis stars like Maria Sharapova and Serena and Venus Williams, had done before.
She wasn’t just wearing a startling walk-on look that was more catwalk than court, as athletes do in basketball and football.
She was wearing a veritable collection created by multiple designers. One that honored both New York fashion and the sports stars who preceded her. Coming just days before New York Fashion Week is scheduled to start, her entrances served as a curtain raiser for an entirely different kind of audience — one that positioned Osaka as a new kind of influencer.
“I think we’re really coming into a tennis renaissance age where so many players are embracing fashion, and Osaka is at the forefront of that,” said Sunita Kumar Nair, the author of “Ace: The Times & Style of Tennis.”
The pageantry began during Osaka’s pretournament practices at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, when she paid homage to a famous 2003 photograph of Anna Kournikova arriving at the tennis complex wearing a minidress and Valentino heels and carrying a Vuitton bag. Only she raised it one, making every arrival a fashion moment even before the Open began. Practice Day 1 was a diaphanous tangerine miniskirt and strapless top; Day 2, a draped caramel mini; Day 3, a ruched turquoise number, and so on.
And it really came into focus at the tournament, when Osaka decided for the first time to wear three different designer looks, one for each of her possible early match entrances — all inspired by the basketball player Allen Iverson to match the basketball theme of Nike’s U.S. Open kit — and had enlisted the “image architect” Law Roach to help realize her plans.
The first look: an asymmetrical gray hoodie from Who Decides War, the sleeves cut off and one side of the hem stretching to the ankle, atop a wedding cake-like white tulle skirt.
The second one: a sheer Thom Browne jacket embroidered with little silver rackets atop a long pleated skirt open at the front so it appeared like a train (with matching looks worn by her mom and publicist, as well as other members of her support team).
The third one: a Monse look to come.
And there may be more combinations of the pieces she has already worn if Osaka advances in the tournament. Still, whatever happens with the trophy, one thing is clear: Osaka has permanently changed expectations around tennis and dress.
Even if she didn’t mean to do that in the beginning, exactly.
Learning to Serve Looks as Well as Aces
“I feel like I’ve always had the idea in my head,” Osaka, 28, said a few days before the Open as she was getting her hair and makeup done before a cookout she was hosting in Dumbo. She was wearing a pair of jeans covered in upcycled patches from Boston and New York teams that she had discovered on a shopping stroll in Brooklyn.
“But I also feel that in Japanese culture, we always follow the rules,” she said. “And I didn’t know if I would be breaking the rules to be so fashionable. I felt like I needed to get permission to do that.”
Her breakthrough, she said, was the Yoon Ahn Nike dress she wore to play in the U.S. Open in 2024, at a time when she was struggling to return to tennis after the birth of her daughter. The dress, inspired by Harajuku, featured assorted ruffles and bows. (Osaka grew up in New York and Florida, and her mother is Japanese. When Osaka visited Tokyo as a preteen, she was dazzled by the styles.)
Before she wore it, she had been publicly defined largely by her four Grand Slam wins (including two U.S. Open championships) and her willingness to discuss her struggles with mental health. When she speaks, she is very deliberate, choosing her words with care. She rarely smiles in portraits. But with the “Lolita goth” dress, as she called it, and what came after, it was as if she had donned, literally, a different, more lively public persona.
“It’s given me an outlet to — I don’t want to say release the stress — but maybe have a different conversation and show people part of my life outside of tennis,” she said.
“I am a pretty private person,” Osaka continued. But when she puts on a new look, she said, “I feel like we’re all kind of exploring together. It’s not that I have multiple personalities, but every time I wear a different outfit, it’s like a different character, almost like a video game, where you can select different avatars. And for me, it always feels like whatever story we’re telling and whatever outfit I’m wearing, it’s like a different version of myself.”
By January 2026, Osaka was ready to try something bigger, taking a page from the tunnel walks that have become the norm in other sports — but raising them from the level of sportswear to evening wear. She turned to the young couturier Robert Wun, whose often fantastical work she had discovered on Instagram.
“I thought I was just going to ask, and he was going to say no,” she said. “Why would he want to design something for me to play tennis?”
Well, perhaps because most of the world that knew Wun’s design considered him a fashion dreamer whose work was limited to the Met Gala-going set. Indeed, Wun jumped at the chance to work with Osaka.
It was the first time his work had been on “mainstream channel news, like CNN, the BBC,” he said. “Even my parents in Hong Kong watch early news in the morning and woke up and saw that I was mentioned.”
Still, when Osaka picked up his jellyfish-inspired parasol and hat before her first game, she almost backed out. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m doing this,’” she said. “Then I remember walking on the court with my umbrella and hearing gasps. I always tell people I never hear anybody in the arena, but it was such an audible noise, it stuck with me.”
At this point, Thom Browne said, letting fashion speak for her is “one of her superpowers.”
It has the additional benefit, the author Nair added, of throwing some opponents off their games. (During the French Open, Osaka’s first-round opponent criticized the “fashion show” going on beforehand.) “I think of a peacock, where they start showing their feathers to ward off predators,” Nair said.
Changing the Game
Though Osaka was an ambassador for Louis Vuitton, that relationship is over, and she is free to work with any brand — as long as it can satisfy the time and logistic requirements of her job. (She has only minutes to take off her walk-on looks and start playing, so outfits need to be created with disrobing in mind.) After Wun, came a sequined gold Germanier for the French Open in May and an all-white kimono by Hana Yagi for Wimbledon in June. Osaka discovers designers on Instagram, through stylist friends, and by wandering into stores wherever she is playing.
Afterward, she stores everything at her home in North Carolina.
“I keep them in dust bags because I feel like my daughter might grow up and want to borrow them,” Osaka said. Her daughter, who is 3, is “so opinionated,” she said. “She loves a dress.” Osaka also has an apartment in Dumbo, where at the moment there is a rack of dresses and heels for her practice looks, and in the mornings her daughter helps her choose what to wear.
When Nike told her its theme for the U.S. Open, Osaka said, “I kind of sat with that for a while because, honestly, basketball doesn’t really mean much to me. But eventually I started thinking about players that have impacted the sport, and that, style-wise, have changed the game.” That led her to Iverson, the former Philadelphia 76er who brought hip-hop style to the league.
“He’s shifted the way N.B.A. players dress, and the whole conversation around clothes in sports, and expressing yourself through style,” Osaka said in a news conference before the Open. (She was wearing an Iverson T-shirt at the time, in case anyone didn’t get it.) Now she is trying to do the same.
After she won her first match at the U.S. Open, when she was fielding questions from the press about the surprisingly close match, she deftly used fashion to change the focus. “I just get really nervous during the first round of this tournament, because I want to do well,” she said. “And I want to show you guys some more outfits.”
Soon she may not be the only one. At Wimbledon, Nair said: “I was watching Aryna Sabalenka watching Osaka come out, and there was clearly a kind of upmanship going on. Like, ‘Yeah, I could do something like that.’ And I thought: ‘This is what is coming. It’s going to be a red carpet on the tennis court. Soon, people are going to be lining up and saying, ‘What are you wearing?’ before they go on.”
Callie Holtermann contributed reporting.
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