On Naomi Osaka, the sport that won’t stop demanding her silence, and what fashion has always understood that tennis refuses to.
“Before I am an athlete, I am a Black woman.”
Naomi Osaka, 2020.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that follows a Black woman who dares to occupy space at the front of any room. Not the exhaustion of effort. The exhaustion of justification. The slow, grinding labor of having to explain, over and over again, why she belongs there at all.
Naomi Osaka has been doing that labor since she was eighteen years old. She has done it on the court and off it, in press conferences and in hospital silences, through Grand Slam trophies and public withdrawals, through seven masks worn at the 2020 US Open, each one bearing the name of a Black person killed at the hands of a state that was supposed to protect them. She has never been allowed to simply play tennis. The sport has always needed something more from her, something she was not designed to give and was never asked to.
But there is another story running alongside the one about protest and pain, a story that fashion has been tracking faithfully while sports journalism mostly looked away. It is the story of a woman building, in fabric and silhouette and color, the self that the sport wants to flatten. A self that is Japanese and Black and Haitian and American and none of those things completely. A self that has been winning Grand Slams in couture since before the tennis establishment knew what to do with that.
“She has never been allowed to simply play tennis. The sport has always needed something more from her.”
This is not a profile. It is a reckoning. With what tennis has taken from Black women and what Naomi Osaka, in particular, has quietly refused to surrender.
I. The Sport and Its History
To understand what Osaka is navigating, you have to start further back than her. You have to start with Althea Gibson.
Gibson was born in 1927 in South Carolina to sharecroppers. By 1939 she was the New York City paddle tennis champion, playing on Harlem streets because the private clubs would not have her. When she finally reached the top of the American Tennis Association, the Black alternative built precisely because the United States Lawn Tennis Association barred African Americans from its tournaments, she had already won everything that institution would let her win. The USLTA still would not open its doors. The clubs hosting its sanctioned events were white-only, and entry points into the national rankings ran through those clubs. Excellence, in
this case, was insufficient. The architecture of exclusion was more durable than her talent.
It took Alice Marble, a white four-time national champion, writing a public editorial to shame the USLTA into action. In 1950, Gibson became the first Black person to compete at the US National Championships at Forest Hills. In 1951, the first at Wimbledon. That same year, the first to win a Grand Slam, taking the French singles championship. She did all of this under conditions no white player of her era faced: denied entry to the hotels hosting tournaments, staying instead in the homes of strangers, refused sponsorships that would have given her career a financial floor, subjected to a sporting press that often described her body in terms borrowed from livestock evaluation.
She won anyway. And then tennis mostly forgot her.
Venus and Serena Williams arrived in the late 1990s and were met with a particular strain of viciousness that the sport had been rehearsing since Gibson’s time. Their bodies were described as too powerful, too masculine, too threatening. Commentators debated whether they were athletic or merely physical, as if the distinction made sense. In 2001, at Indian Wells, a crowd booed Serena Williams onto the court after Venus withdrew from their semifinal due to injury. The crowd called her and her father racial slurs. The Williams family boycotted that tournament for fourteen years. No institutional sanction was ever levied. The crowd, after all, was just reacting.
When Serena wore a compression catsuit at the 2018 French Open, designed to prevent blood clots following her near-fatal postpartum pulmonary embolism, the French Tennis Federation
banned the garment. Federation president Bernard Giudicelli said it had “gone too far” and that the sport must “respect the game and the place.” Serena was asked to “dress appropriately.” She had just nearly died giving birth. The sport responded by policing what she chose to cover her body with.
That is the institution Naomi Osaka walked into.
II. The Weight She Carried and What She Said Out Loud
Osaka won her first Grand Slam at the 2018 US Open in the most complicated circumstances possible. She defeated Serena Williams in a final that fell apart when Williams received a code violation for coaching, a point penalty for racquet abuse, and a game penalty for verbal abuse of the umpire. The crowd booed through the trophy ceremony. Osaka stood there, eighteen years old, weeping, apologizing to the crowd for winning. She had done nothing wrong. She would spend years carrying the emotional weight of that afternoon.
By 2020, after two more Grand Slam titles, she began speaking. At the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati, she announced she was withdrawing from her semifinal to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She called it what it was: “the continued genocide of Black people at the hands of police.” The tournament paused play for a day. It was the first athlete boycott of a professional tennis match in the modern era, and it worked because Osaka had the credibility and the platform to make the sport listen.
At that year’s US Open, she wore a different mask before each match. Seven matches, seven names: Breonna Taylor. Elijah McClain. Ahmaud Arbery. Trayvon Martin. George Floyd. Philando Castile. Tamir Rice. She won the tournament. She said afterward that she had hoped someone would ask her about the masks, so she could talk about the people whose names she wore. Almost nobody did. The sports press mostly covered her tennis.
“She wore seven names to seven matches and won the tournament. Almost nobody asked her about the names. The sports press covered her tennis.”
In 2021, before the French Open, she announced she would not be attending mandatory post-match press conferences. She cited her mental health and the anxiety those sessions produced in her. Offered to pay any fines. And asked that the money go to mental health charities.
The four Grand Slam organizations issued a joint statement threatening her with expulsion. They fined her fifteen thousand dollars after her first-round win. The pressure built until she withdrew entirely, then disclosed publicly that she had been living with depression since 2018, since the night she stood on that court in New York and cried while a crowd jeered her first major title.
The coverage that followed was instructive. A significant portion of it framed her withdrawal as a failure of professional obligation. She had, the argument went, responsibilities to the media and the tournament. Her mental health, however serious, did not supersede those responsibilities. This is the logic applied to Black women in elite sport routinely: that their bodies and minds are institutional property, available for use until they malfunction. That rest is dereliction. That silence is an act of aggression.
III. The Language She Has Always Spoken
The thing that distinguishes Naomi Osaka from every other conversation about Black women in sport is what she is building in parallel with all of that. While tennis has been demanding she justify her presence, she has been conducting a masterclass in visual self-authorship that the fashion world has been watching with something close to reverence.
Start at the 2021 Australian Open. She walked onto the court in a charcoal and black Nike catsuit layered over a neon orange skirt, wristbands, sneakers all in that same burning orange, Louis Vuitton jewelry catching the light. She wore it to defeat Serena Williams in the semifinals and then to claim her fourth Grand Slam title in the final. The color wasn’t accident. Orange carries different resonance in Japanese culture, where it signals courage and happiness, and in the Black American aesthetic tradition, where it has been reclaimed as a color of power. She was wearing both of her inheritances simultaneously. She won wearing them both.
At the 2024 US Open, her return to the tournament after giving birth to her daughter Shai, she wore a collaboration with designer Yoon Ahn under the AMBUSH label for Nike. The look: a white bomber jacket with an enormous lemon-green bow at the back, a matching pleated skirt, sneakers with a bow-like ribbon at the heel. The references were explicit. Harajuku street fashion. Lolita goth. The Japanese subcultures that built their own visual grammar precisely because mainstream fashion had no room for them. Osaka was wearing a meditation on outsider aesthetics into the most mainstream tennis tournament on earth. Pearl details in her hair. A Louis Vuitton necklace she has worn as an ambassador for the house since 2021. She won her first-round match in that look, 6-3, 6-2.
For the 2025 US Open, she arrived in a head-to-toe red Nike look: an embellished cropped jacket, a bubble-hem skirt, red sneakers with custom rose detailing, sparkling rose accessories threaded through her hair. Her racquet bag carried a Labubu charm she had christened Billie
Jean Bling, a crystal-covered figure honoring the woman who fought for equal pay in a sport that had structured its prize money around the assumption that women’s tennis was worth less. That detail alone is worth more than most essays written about Osaka in 2025. She was naming her talisman after the woman who understood what it meant to fight an institution from inside it.
And then the 2026 Australian Open, where she walked onto Rod Laver Arena in the most theatrical entrance the tournament has likely ever seen: a wide-brimmed hat, a white veil, a parasol, a jellyfish-inspired ensemble she designed with Nike and the London couturier Robert Wun, known for dressing Beyonce and Cardi B. The jellyfish came from a children’s book she had been reading with Shai. The butterfly details referenced a moment in 2021 when a butterfly landed on her mid-match at this same tournament, a moment that felt at the time like accident and now reads, in retrospect, like prophecy. Fans watching the entrance online wrote that she was bringing theatre back to tennis. She was. She has been for years. Nobody in the sports press gave her credit for it.
IV. The Incident at Flushing Meadows
August 27, 2025. Second round of the US Open. Taylor Townsend defeated Jelena Ostapenko 7-5, 6-1. At the net, in the post-match handshake, the Latvian player told Townsend she had “no class” and “no education.” The argument lasted thirty seconds on live television. Ostapenko said it was because Townsend had not apologized for a net cord, a ball that clips the top of the net and falls on the opponent’s side. Apology for net cords is a courtesy, not a rule. Townsend had chosen not to offer it. Ostapenko’s response was to reach for two of the oldest and most durable
slurs applied to Black women in American life: that they lack refinement and that they lack intellect.
Townsend herself was careful in her public response. She said she had not taken the comments as racially charged. Also said, in the same breath: “that has been a stigma in our community of being not educated and all of the things, when it’s the furthest thing from the truth.” She was holding two things at once. The grace of choosing not to escalate, and the honesty of naming what those words carry in their marrow.
Osaka did not hold back. She was asked about it after her own third-round win and she said: “It’s one of the worst things you can say to a Black tennis player in a majority white sport. I know Taylor and I know how hard she’s worked and I know how smart she is, so she’s the furthest thing from uneducated or anything like that.” She added, pointedly, that this was not the worst thing she had heard Ostapenko say. That Ostapenko might not have known the full history of those words in America, but that she would not forget the lesson now.
“No education. No class. Two of the oldest slurs applied to Black women in American life, deployed on one of the most watched courts in the world.”
Months later, at the French Open, Osaka and Townsend hosted the Black Party, a dinner for Black tennis players and the Black tennis community. Coco Gauff was there. Gael Monfils, playing his final professional season, was there. It was held in conjunction with Roland Garros, the same tournament that had fined Osaka four years earlier and threatened to expel her for the crime of protecting her mind. The backlash came quickly. Social media filled with exactly the objection it always fills with when Black people create space for themselves: what if a white player had done this?
Osaka’s response on Threads was instructive in its specificity. She wrote about watching her father, a Haitian man, be discriminated against. About police being called on him at tennis courts. She wrote that there were things she would apologize for in her life, but celebrating Blackness would not be one of them. The post was later deleted. The words had already traveled.
V. What Fashion Understood First
Louis Vuitton signed Naomi Osaka as an ambassador in 2021. Nike has been with her since 2019. Tag Heuer. Levi’s. Comme des Garcons. The fashion world understood something that the sports establishment has been slow to articulate: that Osaka is not simply a Black woman athlete. She is a cultural entity whose aesthetic choices constitute a living archive of identity negotiation in the twenty-first century.
Consider what her clothes are actually doing. The 2024 US Open look drew from Harajuku and Lolita goth, subcultural movements built by young Japanese women who had been told that femininity had a single acceptable form and who responded by building an entirely new one from scratch. The jellyfish look at the 2026 Australian Open took the fluid, contradictory biology of a deep-sea creature and made it a metaphor for a woman navigating two cultures, two sports identities, a new motherhood, and a career resurrection simultaneously. The red Billie Jean Bling look at the 2025 US Open named its own iconographic reference before it walked onto the court.
None of this is coincidence. Osaka has said in interviews that she thinks of her on-court looks as chapters in a story she is writing for herself. She is her own author in a sport that has historically asked Black women to be grateful narrators of someone else’s story, to play tennis, win trophies, and leave the meaning-making to others.
The off-court moments matter too. She appeared at the 2024 Baby2Baby Gala in a deconstructed Louis Vuitton gown from the house’s fall 2024 collection, asymmetrical gray knit layered over a white base, a shredded skirt extending down on either side like feathers. She wore her hair in teased-out curls, silver chandelier earrings, strappy heels. The look was difficult. It required confidence to pull off and knowledge of what difficulty in fashion communicates. She wore it like it was the easiest thing she had ever done.
At the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris she wore a sheer light-blue blouse with a thigh-high slit black maxi skirt, carrying the Louis Vuitton GO-14 Mini Malletage, standing against the Frank Gehry building’s architectural glass like a figure who has learned to occupy grand spaces without apology. Off court in another moment, a strapless orange babydoll dress with white Nike trainers and a Louis Vuitton Speedy bag, the high-low combination executed with the ease of someone who has stopped asking whether it is appropriate to mix idioms.
The fashion press has largely gotten this right. The sports press has not. To sports journalism, Osaka’s clothes are an interesting footnote to her tennis. To fashion journalism, her tennis is the context for the clothes. The truth is that neither frame is large enough. She is both things entirely, at the same time, and the inability to hold that is an institutional failure, not a personal one.
VI. The Demand She Has Never Stopped Making
There is a through-line that connects Althea Gibson being denied entry to white tennis clubs in the 1940s to Serena Williams being told to dress appropriately in 2018 to Naomi Osaka being
fined for protecting her mental health in 2021 to Taylor Townsend being told, on live television, in 2025, that she has no education. The line is this: the sport has always reserved the right to define what a Black woman’s presence should look and sound like inside it.
Gibson was told to be grateful for access and quiet about discrimination. Williams was told to be dominant on the court and composed off it, to carry the weight of representation without ever making the weight visible. Osaka was told that her mind was the institution’s resource and her pain was her own problem. The variation changes. The demand does not.
What Osaka has done, across seven years of professional tennis, is make that demand legible. She has named it in press conferences and in withdrawn statements on social media. Worn it in the silhouettes she chooses, the names of her talismans, designers she elevates, parties she throws. She has made her interiority visible in a sport that has always preferred Black women be surfaces rather than subjects.
She was ranked world number one. Has four Grand Slam titles. One of the highest-paid female athletes in the history of the sport. Been told she is too emotional, too political, too vocal, too quiet, too present, too absent. She has had a child and returned to professional tennis and walked onto Rod Laver Arena in a veil and a parasol in an entrance that made the internet stop scrolling. She has done all of this while the sport she plays has spent years trying to decide how much of her it is willing to accommodate.
The answer she keeps giving, in every garment and every statement and every match she chooses to play or not play, is that she is not asking the sport to accommodate her. She is remaking what the sport can be, one chapter at a time, and it is the sport that will have to catch up.
