By Luce Martini
It is fair to say that this is unlikely to go down in history as the day tennis discovered style. On 5 March, the ATP unveiled its new fashion ritual at Indian Wells, “Athlete Arrivals”, complete with dedicated styling, editorial shoots and the involvement of Mobolaji Dawodu, former fashion director at GQ. The tone was one of revelation. Tennis, apparently, had finally opened a dialogue with fashion, given players more room to express their style and cast a hopeful glance towards a new audience. All terribly solemn, for something fashion had grasped years ago, without needing anyone’s permission.
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The truth is that fashion had already got to tennis, made itself comfortable and ordered a drink. Back in 2021, Vogue was already talking openly about tennis and golf as two sports perfectly suited to the contemporary imagination: elegance, club culture, neatly packaged wellbeing and technical movement polished until it became aesthetics. In the years since, that relationship has only deepened: in many cases now, more than half of a top player’s earnings come off court, through endorsements and partnerships, often in fashion, luxury and adjacent lifestyle categories rather than from the sport itself.
In 2025, Vogue wrote about its “obsession” with tennis, citing, among other things, Bottega Veneta with Lorenzo Musetti, Gucci with Jannik Sinner, the Coco Gauff (we had already touched on this here), New Balance, Miu Miu collab and Naomi Osaka, whose on-court image has increasingly been built as a fashion narrative in its own right.. In the same year, Vogue Business described the US Open as its most fashion-forward edition ever, with capsules, pop-ups, hospitality and celebrity dressing everywhere. In other words, the material was already circulating quite freely. Indian Wells did not open the door, it merely discovered the room was full.
Organised tennis, the world of enthusiastic press releases and positioning strategies, is now trying to place an official stamp on a dynamic that has been passing it by for some time. And in doing so, the difference is immediately apparent between a maison using tennis as a cultural language and a tour trying to give itself a lifestyle makeover by treating a few player arrivals as though they were events of historic significance. Fashion has been working with tennis and golf for years because they offer something useful: status, surface and a particular vision of the world. It was hardly waiting for Indian Wells to wave it through.
This is where the ATP operation becomes interesting, albeit for reasons slightly different from the ones its architects had in mind. It has the unmistakable profile of institutional lateness. When an establishment turns up late, it tends to become rather attached to the most visible parts: the players’ arrivals, the styling, the “editorial” content, the language of personal brand identity. Fashion, however, is not moved by dutiful cameos. What interests fashion about a tennis player is, first and foremost, that he is a tennis player. The athletic body, the competitive credibility, the discipline, the recognisable face, that is where the rest begins. No one was really crying out to see an athlete dispatched towards the tournament entrance looking as though he had been invited to fashion week by administrative error.
At moments, some of those Indian Wells “Athlete Arrivals” looked less like fashion than like the arrival of the wedding guests in The Godfather. Which, in its own way, gets to the heart of the problem. The whole thing felt less like a fashion language than a highly managed piece of theatre: stiff, showy and rather too pleased with itself. As though someone had taken the idea of style and reduced it to the simple act of walking slowly towards a camera. The issue is one of function more than aesthetics. A runway has its own rhythm, its own grammar and its own setting. Dressing an athlete in a carefully assembled look and asking him to walk ten metres does not, by itself, produce fashion. What you get instead is a promotional asset with impeccable manners and an unmistakable hunger for legitimacy.
One need only read the ATP release to see where the real centre of the operation lies. Its three declared pillars are events, athletes and content. Then come the media partnerships, amplification across TikTok, Spotify, Overtime and creator networks, styling sessions and crossover opportunities. All perfectly legitimate, of course. But this is still marketing territory, borrowing the language of fashion and hoping the furniture will do the rest. When fashion decides to occupy a space, it tends to walk in first and explain itself later. Here, by contrast, the packaging arrived bang on time. The rest still looked as though it was in a taxi.
Meanwhile, outside the offices of tennis, fashion is carrying on with remarkable calm and without waiting for authorisation. You can see it in athlete sponsorships, in capsule collections, in ambassador choices and in the way entire sports are absorbed, cleaned up and repackaged as desirable worlds. Golf included, naturally, which has for years been exceptionally fertile ground for collaborations and sport-luxe products. The point was never to make athletes do a turn on the catwalk. The point was to use their world, their setting, their imagery. A slightly subtler operation, and usually a much more effective one.
So the lesson, in the end, is fairly simple.
Tennis would do well to focus on tennis. Fashion is already taking from tennis what it needs. It wants the champions, the stories, the social codes, the aspiration, the sense of privileged access. It wants the raw material, not a tournament pretending to be a style publisher for an afternoon. When tennis produces matches, rivalries, faces, moments and characters, fashion turns up of its own accord, and often well before anyone else. When the institution decides to play the part itself, the result risks resembling those occasions when someone dresses to look natural and ends up merely looking dressed.
Perhaps that is the most revealing detail of the whole affair. With its “Athlete Arrivals”, the ATP thinks it is keeping pace, but in reality it is confirming the delay. When the institutional power of a sport officially discovers something culture had already absorbed, it is usually not leading change. It is chasing it.
And with that peculiar confidence of someone who has not yet realised he arrived after everyone else.
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