Have tennis outfits always been this outrageous? Kind of

(CNN) — As Wimbledon began this week, Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka made an entrance in the high style that has become her signature: an elaborate robe by Tokyo-based designer Hana Yagi, made from vintage kimonos and bridal gowns, over a white Nike tennis dress.

The designer said the one-two look was a marker of the almost sacred ceremony of preparing for competition, which is shed to reveal the game-ready gear. “I wanted the garment to exist as the moment before performance,” Yagi told Vogue. “The walk-on surrounds Naomi in ceremony, while the Nike kit represents the athlete in competition. I thought about them as two chapters within the same story.”

“I like to use fashion as a medium for storytelling,” Osaka added.

The following day, Serena Williams made her on-court comeback, returning to this summer’s Grand Slam tournaments at age 44, four years after she announced her retirement, in a more sedate but no less stylish ensemble by Nike: a white top and skirt and matching windbreaker, punched with eyelets for a breezy but all-business look.

Coming on the heels of Osaka’s elaborate custom ensembles at the French Open in May , you might think this marks a new chapter in the relationship between tennis and fashion — that the sport, known for its conservative dress codes (including Wimbledon’s famous all-white mandate) is suddenly embracing Met Gala-worthy fashion.

But tennis has always been deeply intertwined with fashion — from its beginnings, in fact. Players like Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills had Paris’s best designers do their on-court ensembles. While men like René Lacoste and Bunny Austin looked to sources like traditional Aran knits to develop the celebrated tennis sweater, or more aggressive sports, like English football, for comfort-driven innovations like shorts.

“Women just wanted to freely move, and so did the men,” said Sunita Kumar Nair, author of the newly released “ACE: The Times and Style of Tennis.” “And because these people were generally very rich, they could afford to go to Jean Patou or Gabrielle Chanel and say, because they’re suiting and booting them anyway for their daily life or their eveningwear — let’s make this elite connection.”

It isn’t simply that tennis players are innately comfortable collaborating with designers, though. The parameters of tennis beget style in a way few other sports allow. Yes, basketball players may be celebrated for their tunnel fits; NFL players like Travis Kelce are Tommy Hilfiger ambassadors or, like Tom Brady, launching their own labels; and soccer stars now have better bag collections than many “Real Housewives.”

But seldom are these athletes appreciated for what they wear while playing. Tennis is the rare sport without a uniform, and the dynamics of solo play, in which a camera or a spectator’s eyes linger on a player for up to five hours at a time, Kumar Nair points out, allow their individual imprint to shine.

“Most of them are extraordinary personas, and they’re contained within this box to play, and you have all these rigorous rules within the game — not only in the point structure and the technicalities of the game, but also in the etiquette, or the conduct,” she added.

So they take their uniform-less play as an opportunity. Looking back at players like Lenglen or Andre Agassi, “They really enjoyed that form of expression of themselves, because they felt that the designs, in a way, reflected who they were. Even when Serena and Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were wearing Nike, even though it was all within the umbrella of the sporting brand, they were very clever in identifying these personas and giving them their own costumes, their own kind of signature style.”

She points to Williams’s denim tennis skirt, worn with a studded black tank top to the 2004 US Open (which was inspired in part by Agassi’s jean shorts at the 1988 competition), as a particularly innovative example.

Even when players adhere closely to the rules, they manage to flout them with great individuality. At Wimbledon in 2008, both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal wore the expected white, but with completely different panache: Federer in a traditional white cardigan with gold buttons and accents and his own insignia, looked like a polite satire of the English gentleman, while Nadal, in Nike whites and a matching headband, played the sleek modern athlete.

Kumar Nair said an Adidas designer told her the company views the constrictions of tennis attire, such as Wimbledon’s all-white dress code or regulations around the size of logos or amount of flesh exposed, as an enticing challenge: “When somebody asks you to shut one door, you open another, and it really pushes you to think outside the box. How else am I going to take it to somewhere or some place that no one has ever seen before?” she recalled him saying. “He was literally relishing it!”

Players in Adidas have worn designs from Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3 collaboration with the sportswear brand that play on the Japanese master’s love of overalls, for example, and created an argyle pattern that still conformed to Wimbledon’s all-white limits. “The rules do allow for this expansion, this creative expansion, as opposed to restriction,” said Kumar Nair.

Perhaps what makes this moment, with Osaka in couture-level designs and Jannik Sinner’s partnership Gucci, different, is that designers are pushing themselves to develop pieces that are as much aesthetically fresh as they are practical: Yagi designed Osaka’s ceremonial robe, cinched and decorated as it is, so that, like a traditional windbreaker or sweatshirt, the walk-on look could be removed “in well under a minute,” the designer told Vogue, to reveal her competition-ready Nike kit. Kumar Nair said that designers are now thinking as much about the fashion impact of the pieces they develop as their athletic viability: “There is more of a seal of approval for their designs if the model or athlete is really moving and prancing around.”

She imagines that a world in which tennis warrants fashion commentary on the level of award shows is not far off: “I feel tennis has graduated on that spectrum, that creative arc, and it’s just getting better and better.”

Of course, tennis has an ally that no other sport does: super fan Anna Wintour. “If you remember seeing Serena on the cover of Vogue, or Roger — who does that? She put Hollywood on there, and musicians on there, but to have the foresight of seeing that actually, sports players have the same cache and the same value, that same ambassadorial value — that’s so smart of her.”

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