How Serena Williams Used Fashion to Express Herself and Change the Game

The New York Times

When Serena Williams took to the court for what could be her last U.S. Open on Monday, she did so wearing a little black (tennis) dress with long sleeves, a six-layer skirt — a layer for every US Open title she’s won—and a bodice that sparkles a veritable galaxy of stars. It’s a dress made for the farewell to a supernova. The perfect model, in more ways than one. If you don’t pay attention to the symbolism, you will burn your loot.

After all, Williams revealed her plans to end her tennis career in an article published not in ESPN, Sports Illustrated or Tennis Week, but in the September issue of Vogue magazine, for whose cover she posed wearing a variety of evening gowns. Although the vehicle chosen for the article was met with some incomprehension in the sporting world, the choice should not have come as a surprise.

Since he started in professional tennis in 1995, Williams, 40, has used his personal presentation as a weapon to bring about change, with an effectiveness rarely seen among athletes; what she wore, throughout all this time, was perfected and developed with as much care as her serve or forehand. The tennis player broke down barriers of race, age and origin, and demolished the old tennis dress codes.

Williams always had a plan that went beyond the simple sport, and that intention was present throughout the images she helped create. For her, it was never just about adding a stripe here, a little neon there. The tennis player’s intention was to fulfill herself; expand in countless ways —physical, professional—the definition of what was possible, and who had the right to decide.

Her on-court wardrobe was a “visual manifestation of her playful side, her energy and her barrier-breaking mentality,” said Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the editor who styled Williams’ recent Vogue photo shoot. Her choices have always been calculated to succinctly express the point of view “that women deserve to be seen,” said Tania Flynn, Nike’s vice president of women’s apparel design.

As one of the rare black women in tennis, with a background and body that didn’t fit the sport’s favored mythologies, Williams was aware “of the number of eyes and cameras on her,” said John Hoke, vice president of design by Nike, who has worked with the tennis player for almost 20 years.

And, said Gerald Marzorati, author of the 2021 book “Seeing Serena,” “if she was the object of attention, her attitude was always that it was better to be the subject of that attention than the object.”

Since people were going to look, and judge, Williams decided to take advantage of this scrutiny not only to further his tennis career, but to change the playing field for the benefit of all. The racket was one way to do it. And fashion, another.

DEMOLITING THE CODES OF THE PAST

When Williams and her older sister Venus arrived on the scene, the women’s tennis dress, like the tennis shoe itself, was still mired in the quagmire of tradition, coupled with an old-fashioned image of slender blonde women running around the court wearing ponytails. horse and a tiny “skirt” or “dress”, which served as a conceptual remnant of the longer dresses that preceded them.

The distinction between genders was strong, and highly stereotyped (after all, we are talking about a sport in which, until the end of the 20th century, tennis players wore frilly panties, as if they were dolls, under their fake skirts), and white predominated. . Literally, in the case of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, also known as Wimbledon, where the dress code of the players specifies the color of the uniforms.

It was, according to Stanford Law School professor Richard Thompson Ford and author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History,” “an extension of country clubs. And the costume reflected that fact.”

Of course, fashion had occasionally served to clutter, ever since Suzanne Lenglen shortened the hem of her skirt in the 1920s, leading to the emergence of “lines of spectators waiting to see her play at Wimbledon with a skirt above her ankles”. said Marzorati.

On the male side of the sport, of course, André Agassi started a moment of change with his mullet haircut, denim shorts and neon colors, scandalizing the powerful of the moment. (He boycotted Wimbledon for three years because of the dress code.) But many of the sport’s previous black players — Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Zina Garrison — dressed, Ford said, in “respectability politics” style, trying to to fit in.

“Style-wise, tennis has historically been a very conservative sport — a gentleman’s sport,” said Karefa-Johnson. “Of course, all this semantics actually only reinforces the latent white supremacy in sport and justifies the exclusion of any person or body that falls outside the prescribed code for the participants and the audience. something other than herself”. Ford defines the process as “a different way of integrating a sport”.

It all started when Williams and his sister took to the court wearing braids and beads in their hair, and it has continued over the years, becoming increasingly deliberate and political. Nike’s Hoke, where one of the design department’s buildings is named after Serena Williams, said that on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of involvement with her clothing, the tennis player certainly ranks at 10.

If at first his interest was simply to express a certain joy when dressing for tournaments – taking inspiration from urban fashion trends, with the use of denim and metallic studs, and from the catwalk trends, with “mesh” and snakeskin prints. — time has transformed her into a woman with enough power and prestige to protest injustice and inequality; made her a mother and activist; and she highlighted, as Nike’s Flynn said, “the importance of the message.”

Sometimes literally, like when Williams wore a black and white top and tennis skirt accompanied by a trapezoidal jacket and long overskirt at the 2019 French Open, displaying, in French, the words “mother, champion, queen, goddess”. (The uniform was created with Virgil Abloh of Off-White, a stylist who also knew something about opening doors and who became close friends with Williams before her death in 2021.)

And sometimes more implicitly, as in the skin-tight black jumpsuit she wore to the 2018 French Open, designed in part to manage potential blood clots after a difficult birth, and in part to reflect the status of working mothers as ” superheroines”, according to Williams’ statements at the time. The model unleashed such a storm — French officials dismissed it as a dress code violation — that Williams’ next look, a one-sleeve tutu worn at the US Open and also designed by Abloh, seemed like a response to those who considered previous look as “insufficiently feminine”.

Things got to a point, according to Marzorati, where “seeing Serena come out of the tunnel and onto the court and find out what she was wearing” became an event in itself. But while the observers’ attention may have been focused on the clothes, they ended up absorbing a broader lesson.

BREAKING THE FASHION BARRIER

Fashion and tennis have been intertwined for Williams practically from the start. If his father Richard Williams created the framework for his sporting career, his mother Oracene Price laid the groundwork for her daughter’s appreciation for clothes.

Price taught her to sew when she was two or three and, said Serena Williams, “I used to see her put those old Vogue patterns on the floor to cut the fabric.”

Williams arrived at the real Vogue in 1998, when she and her sister posed for the magazine wearing Carolina Herrera models in black and white, a cameo that served as the starting point for a friendship with Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue (and big fan of the sneaker). ). In Williams’ words, this friendship was “important for my upbringing”.

“She’s a special person and I really adore her,” Williams told Naomi Campbell on her YouTube show, “No Filter With Naomi.” “I love hanging out with her. And I love her brain.” Wintour, for her part, defined Williams as “fearless”, on the court, in her wardrobe play and in her ease of “erasing boundaries”.

Williams certainly erased some boundaries in Vogue, becoming the first black athlete to grace the magazine’s cover in 2012, alongside soccer player Hope Solo and swimmer Ryan Lochte, and after that she appeared on more Vogue covers than than any other sportsman. He posed for covers in 2015, 2018 and 2022 (the last two times with his daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr.).

Wintour took her to fashion shows—Williams took to Instagram to describe one such trip, to Milan—and not only suggested the designer she chose for her wedding dress, Sarah Burton by Alexander McQueen, he saw all the sketches of the show. model.

In 2018, Williams followed the example of her sister, Venus, who had created a fashion line in 2007, and started working in clothing design (both attended design school at the Fort Lauderdale Art Institute, although Serena did not graduated), and in 2020 she revealed her S by Serena line at New York Fashion Week, in a show whose first part was a friendly debate between Williams and Wintour.

The year before, she had hosted the Met Gala, alongside Harry Styles, Lady Gaga and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, wearing Versace and Nikes. The following year, she created the Serena Williams Design Crew at Nike to lower barriers to entry for young, non-white, non-traditionally trained designers. She even walked the runway at Paris Fashion Week in March in an Off-White tribute to Virgil Abloth.

Before that, though, in 2006, Chris Evert, a player who dominated women’s tennis in the 1970s and 1980s and later became president of the USTA Foundation and cancer research activist, wrote an “open letter” to Williams. in Tennis magazine, pointing out that her colleague had allowed “distractions” like these to keep her from tennis.

“I appreciate the fact that becoming a resourceful person in all areas is important to you,” wrote Evert. “Still, one question remains—have you ever considered your place in history? Is this something that matters to you?” From a now point of view, this question has become obsolete. The “distractions” are actually part of the solid foundation of Williams’ legacy. And perhaps they are also a sign of what is yet to come.