At the U.S. Open, Naomi Osaka expands her tennis fashion vision beyond the court
· Yahoo Sports
NEW YORK — In the tennis funhouse that is the U.S. Open, everything is amplified.
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Naomi Osaka has taken her signature moment at Grand Slam tournaments and turned up the volume.
Osaka has been debuting elaborate outfits as she walks out onto court for years. With pieces commissioned with her own money and designed with intention, Osaka has said repeatedly fashion is her way of expressing herself and injecting a little fun into her day job.
When she doesn’t want to talk about her game, she’s more than happy to talk about her clothes and creative process, which can take over a year to reach its final form.
In 2026, she wore a jellyfish-inspired aqua outfit at the Australian Open, a series of overskirts and a glittering bronze dress meant to mimic the Eiffel Tower at the French Open, and a meticulously embroidered, snow-white kimono ensemble at Wimbledon.
For the U.S. Open, Osaka has expanded her vision to photo shoots around the Billie Jean King Tennis Center and a series of mostly self-styled pre-practice looks. One of them, which she wore at the tournament’s media center, was a Dolce & Gabbana dress styled by Law Roach, who also curated her walk-on outfit for the season’s Grand Slam finale.
That outfit, which she wore for her first-round match Monday night against Anastasia Zakharova, paid homage to an NBA legend — though not one the city might have chosen. As New York continues to bask in the glory of winning its first NBA championship in 53 years in June, Osaka honored Philadelphia 76ers great Allen Iverson.
Osaka evoked his image wearing a French terry sweatshirt adorned with press clippings of her career highlights, according to Vogue, over a full tulle skirt. She walked out with her hair in cornrows, Iverson’s style of choice, wearing the sweatband, arm sleeve and headband he often wore to play.
The outfit is in line with Nike’s basketball-inspired theme at the U.S. Open, which has defending women’s champion Aryna Sabalenka wearing a bright-orange netted dress and returning men’s champion Carlos Alcaraz sporting a tank top cut like a jersey.
“I think for the fashion, I’m really just inspired by Nike saying it’s a basketball theme,” Osaka said in a news conference Saturday. “So, you know, the NBA and the WNBA have their tunnel walk-ons. I know one year in Toronto, they wanted us to do it, but it never really took off. So I just felt like New York is a good place to attempt it.”
The grandeur and creative spirit of New York has prompted Osaka to do more than just a walk-on outfit for this tournament. The 28-year-old, who has two U.S. Open titles to her name, has been publishing photoshoots taken around the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center all week.
Each nodded to ’90s and early 2000s nostalgia and had Easter eggs such as an editorial code that included her and Iverson’s initials. At her pretournament news conference, Osaka wore what she called “a spectacular eBay purchase,” a U.S. Open ball cap from her birth year, 1997, and a T-shirt with Iverson on it.
“He’s a trailblazer. I think he’s also someone that I look up to a lot, because he’s done a lot in fashion, whether it’s on purpose or not. He’s shifted the way that NBA players dress,” she said.
“I also think the whole conversation around clothes in sports and also just expressing yourself through style, I feel like he’s someone that I look up to in that regard.”
Iverson responded on social media: “Wow, what a honor!! BIG FAN can’t wait to meet you.”
Osaka has been at the mercy of inspiration lately. She cited a story from an old Entertainment Weekly article about how Michael Jackson refused to curb his creative ambition, lest Prince execute his ideas first.
“I literally do the things that I love to do, and I feel like people relate to it, and I’m really glad and grateful for that, because I feel like the type of person I am, a lot of people can see themselves in me. I really, honestly, I love that about myself,” Osaka said.
“I just think, like, randomly I’ll have ideas at 2 a.m., and — like that Michael Jackson clip, or maybe he never said it out loud — but he’s, like, Prince is going to steal my idea if I don’t act on it. I feel like that sometimes. Whenever the ideas come in my head, I just really want to do it.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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