The players look great, the world of fashion wants to be courtside and athleisure is the hot trend. So, it’s no surprise that Serena Williams, Roger Federer and co are now style icons as much as sporting ones
The ranking of tennis on the fashion-sport matrix has long been a contradictory one. Tennis is arguably the most elegant and beautiful of all sports – the Wimbledon whites, the balletic grace, the absence of unsightly mud – but it has felt, in recent history, some way from the pop-cultural zeitgeist. The very power of the cucumber-sandwich, blond-ponytailed aesthetic has kept tennis as an eternally popular catwalk reference, but it has simultaneously distanced it from the present day. Until now.
Tennis in 2016 is about more than blond ponytails. As the sport becomes more modern, more diverse and more inclusive, it becomes more relevant. This is not, of course, primarily about fashion. But how tennis players look is crucial to the general perception of the sport, because snapshot visual images are the information about tennis that reach beyond the sport’s fans.
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