Day 10 of Left Open, Club Leftist Tennis’ daily leftist coverage of the 2022 US Open.
By Gaby Del Valle
I’m not going to recount Serena Williams’s long, illustrious career. This is not a post about her Olympic gold medals or the six times she’s won the U.S. Open, nor is it about her childhood struggles or that movie where Will Smith plays her dad. I’m not going to get into Serena’s rivalry with Venus, and I’m certainly not going to rehash Maria Sharapova’s one-sided feud with her either. I am absolutely not going to talk about how Serena is leaving the beautiful proletarian sport of tennis to be a venture capitalist. In the wake of Serena’s retirement, I’m only interested in discussing one thing: her outfits.
There’s a lot of ground to cover—Serena’s first U.S. Open match was in 1998, and I could easily do a year-over-year retrospective of all her looks between now and then—but I’m going to keep it simple. The most important looks for our purposes are Serena’s Y2K era: the late ‘90s to the years just after the Iraq War started. That’s not to say Serena aesthetically or athletically fell off after that. But anyone who’s been on TikTok or walked through Tompkins Square Park knows that, for better or worse, the ‘00s are back, baby.
Serena’s earliest U.S. Open looks are also her most classic. She wore a simple white Puma tennis dress at her 1998 debut, but her white and yellow beaded braids elevated what would have otherwise been an understated look. She stuck with the white and yellow motif the following year, that time wearing a desaturated tennis ball yellow Puma dress and braids accessorized with white beads. It feels simplistic to say that both looks were tennis personified, but that’s kind of what it was. Serena incorporated the two colors most associated with the sport—tennis whites, the neon-ish yellow of the ball—into her outfits. She won her first U.S. Open in 1999; this year, her daughter Olympia wore those same white beads to her matches. And in 2001, Serena wore yet another yellow Puma dress—this time with black swirls on the side—and matching black and yellow shoes.
A year later, Serena took a break from the tennis dresses and wore a black Puma catsuit that the prudes at the Washington Post called “salacious game attire.” Hot! She softened it with a pink sweatband, a heart-shaped necklace, and a $29,000 diamond tennis bracelet by Harry Winston. Hot and glam!!
2004 was arguably Serena’s most important year, fashion-wise. She switched from Puma to Nike, and for her first Open match, she wore a low-rise pleated denim mini skirt, a black studded sports bra, and custom knee-high boots—it was very hot biker girl, down to her belly button ring. Her other looks that year had a similar vibe. She wore a black studded mini dress another day that year, followed by an all-black look paired with the same boots that was reminiscent of a Juicy tracksuit—instead of a logo on her ass, though, she had SERENA written across the back of her jacket in rhinestones.
Some of you may think I’m downplaying Serena’s talent or abilities by focusing on her clothes (a dumb opinion), or that a leftist tennis blog shouldn’t care about such frivolity (an even dumber opinion). After all, the most important thing about tennis is not your serve or your groundstrokes or your volleys. No—the most important thing about tennis is looking cool. That’s why tennis skirts are back and football jerseys aren’t. There’s nothing cute about wearing a big gaudy shirt with some guy’s last name on it. But a tennis skirt and some little sweatbands? Chic! So as leftists, we must celebrate her fashion, just as much as her championships, as key the material conditions of Serena being the GOAT. All hail the queen.
Gaby Del Valle is a writer and a tennis school dropout.