How the Tennis Court Became the New Red Carpet
A recently released book examines the relationship between the two worlds
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Fashion has always needed a stage, and for the past century, few have been more consequential than the tennis court. British fashion journalist and author Sunita Kumar Nair makes that case with her new book, Ace: The Times Style of Tennis, out this week — a sweeping, photo-rich study of the sport's tangled, deeply productive relationship with the runway. According to Harper's Bazaar, the book arrives just as cultural appetite for that conversation has hit a fever pitch.
Structured around three archetypes — The Classics, The Mavericks, and The Cools — Ace traces a lineage from Suzanne Lenglen to Serena Williams, with historical analysis and original interviews in between. The throughline: tennis has never just been about the game. Kumar Nair highlights how Jean Patou dressed Lenglen in the 1920s, liberating women from garden-party corsets to design something they could actually move in — and then brought those silhouettes into couture. She covers Maria Sharapova's collaboration with Riccardo Tisci (then at Givenchy) and Nike to recreate Hubert de Givenchy's 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany's LBD in Dri-FIT. She interrogates the financial architecture of major brand sponsorships and what they actually give athletes in return: leverage, creative control, a platform that rivals Hollywood.
The Court as Cultural Mirror
"I like to think of the tennis court as a stage, and we are entertainers," Naomi Osaka says in her Ace interview — a quote that captures exactly why this book exists. As athletes cross into the cultural territory once reserved for actors and musicians, the clothes they compete in have become costume, identity, and brand asset simultaneously. Kumar Nair draws a sharp line from André Agassi's neon anti-country-club rebellion to the current moment, where players function as their own creative directors, wielding real power over which houses get to dress them.
What makes Ace particularly satisfying is how it explains the style instincts many of us already have without knowing why. The tennis bracelet. The cable-knit sweater. The pleated skirt. The New Balance sneaker. These aren't just trends — they're filtered references, passed through Ralph Lauren and Tory Burch before they ever reach our closets. And as sporting brands now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with luxury houses in both cultural cachet and resale value, it's worth understanding where that authority was earned. Kumar Nair's answer: on the court, across a hundred years of women fighting — literally, in bloodstained corsets — for the freedom to move.
The tennis court didn't become the new red carpet overnight; it's been building that resume for a century, and Ace is the first book to treat that history with the seriousness it deserves.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
