Naomi Osaka’s Grand Slam outfits are self-expression. Her tennis is getting loud too

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — On Naomi Osaka’s way to turning the tennis court into a high-fashion runway as no one ever has before, she has once again become a truly excellent player — especially in places where she never thought that would happen.

>Osaka, the trailblazing, 28-year-old, four-time Grand Slam champion will play in the second week of Wimbledon for the first time Sunday. She has blitzed through her first three matches without losing a set, losing more than three games in a set just once and looking far from the player she was, who seemed almost allergic to the grass swing and and had seemingly given up hope of having any success on it.

>“It’s kind of a hard thing to fathom given the way she played,” said Australia’s Daria Kasatkina in a news conference, after Osaka won their third-round match 6-1, 6-3 in 65 minutes.

>“I was maybe not expecting what she produced today. But I was expecting it to be a tough, tough match for me, because with her way of playing, honestly, grass must suit her well.

>“I think she’s starting to find her way on grass and you can see this with the results as well.”

>Those results have come alongside a series of Grand Slam fashion statements from Osaka, who has used the walk-on at this year’s three majors to showcase the form of self-expression that she treasures most alongside her tennis. At Wimbledon, she has worn a white ensemble inspired by Japanese ceremonial dress, including a kimono-style dress embroidered with cherry blossoms and cranes, produced in concert with designer Hana Yagi.

>At the Australian Open, she opted for a floaty, flowy jellyfish-inspired ensemble designed by couturier Robert Wun; at the French Open, her array of cascading skirts and golden sparkling dress were inspired by the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower. Osaka has a creative team and works with the designers herself; Nike produces the on-court dresses. They have become the topic of conversation around the sport and in Osaka’s news conferences.

>This is the sort of stuff that would drive a lot of athletes and tennis players mad. They come to the arena to practice a craft they have been training at for almost all of their lives. They’re athletes. They want to talk about their sport.

>Not Osaka, at least not entirely. A decade into a big career that has rollicked up, down and sideways, one of the world’s most famous and exposed introverts may have finally found a comfort zone in tennis through what might be her greatest passion.

>“I would actually prefer to talk about my clothes,” Osaka said in a news conference Friday after the win over Kasatkina. “It’s kind of weird. In some ways I feel like I’m a lot more equipped to talk about my clothes than to talk about my tennis. It’s strange, because I’ve been playing tennis for 20-something years. Some days I don’t feel like an expert on it.”

>In some ways, Osaka said, tennis has become a vehicle for the self-expression she finds far easier with her clothes than her racket. The longer she is in the tournament, the more matches she gets to play. The more matches she gets to play, the more outfits she gets to wear, and the more stories she gets to tell.

>She’s loving the way she’s hitting the ball. Winning, playing with some much confidence, that’s all great. But there’s only so much she feels she can say about tennis. And it’s never been easy for her to talk about.

>Into her teens, Osaka struggled to make eye contact with her coaches. As recently as last year, she said she sometimes feared telling her former coach Patrick Mouratoglou about the stress and discomfort she experienced during matches.

>The outfits she said, have helped her feel more like her authentic self when she steps onto the court.

>“Just being able to communicate my style, being able to communicate my brand of tennis as well, because I feel like for me, my tennis is a little bit louder than I am also.”

>On grass, that may not be the case for long.

>Somewhere along the way in the first part of her career, Osaka convinced herself that grass wasn’t for her. She’d barely played on it growing up. She didn’t play the Wimbledon junior events.

>She was at her best when she could stabilize her feet around the baseline and swing hard, the way she did on hard courts back home in Florida. Grass doesn’t allow for much of that. Neither does Europe’s red clay. Osaka didn’t like playing on that very much either.

>Her seasons seemed to hit a wall in early April, when tennis moved to Europe for three months. For a multitude of reasons, post-Covid, she struggled to restart them.

>The struggles on clay made some sense. Big, flat hitters like her often struggle to get the ball through the court on clay. Grass made less sense. Osaka possessed a big serve, and hit a ball that stayed low and skidded through the court. That ought to work, if she could just get the hang of the footwork.

>In the fall of 2022, Osaka went on hiatus to have her first child, a daughter she would name Shai. By the time she returned in January of 2024, the sport had changed. The best players in the world were hitting even harder than Osaka, and doing it with more shape and curve. More importantly, they were doing it in and out of the corners of the court, turning defense into offense and opening up angles and geometries that aren’t accessible if players stay in the middle.

>Osaka and her coaches knew this. By December of 2023 there was a former ballerina named Simone Elliott attending her practices. As her dance career wound down, Elliott developed a specialty in teaching athletes how to maintain balance as they move at high speed into extreme positions. At the time, Osaka could barely hit an open-stance backhand, an essential shot for top players these days in which the body faces the net, rather than turning perpendicular to it.

>So began the reincarnation of Osaka, but it took some time. She said Friday that she didn’t feel back to her old self until last summer, a full two years after giving birth.

>“The exact moment was when I lost in D.C. last year,” she said, referring to Washington D.C.’s D.C. Open, where she lost handily to Britain’s Emma Raducanu and subsequently split with Mouratoglou.

>“I remember thinking, ‘I lost this match, but I feel like I could move.’

>“I felt, like, a significant click. It took way longer than I thought it was going to take. Ever since then, I’ve felt like I’ve been moving OK.”

>From there, Osaka has been on a mostly steady rise back near the top of the sport. After that loss to Raducanu, she made the Canadian Open final, and then the semifinals of the U.S. Open, dispatching Coco Gauff, one of the best hard-court athletes out there, on the way.

>This season, she keeps running into the best players of the last three years, the ones who changed the sport, seemingly whenever she gets on a roll in a tournament. At the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, the Madrid Open and the French Open, world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka outhit Osaka from the places on the court she is still finding her feet. At the Italian Open, Iga Świątek dispatched her with a clay-court masterclass.

>Osaka faces Sabalenka again in her first Wimbledon fourth round. Perhaps this time will be different.

>Ahead of the grass season, her coach, Tomasz Wiktorowski, who worked with Świątek, encouraged her to shift her thinking about grass. She began to focus more closely on where the ball was bouncing and how she could find ways to come forward.

>She said she remembers being young and stubborn about how she wanted to play on grass courts. She basically tried to pretend it was a hard court. Now, she said, she’s beginning to understand grass court tennis.

>“It’s more free-flowing,” Osaka said.

>So is she.

>This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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