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Naomi Osaka’s renowned 125mph serve is positively slow compared to the jellyfish’s sting, which can cover 10 to 20 micrometres in less than one-millionth of a second. But it wasn’t just the invertebrate’s speed that the tennis player was calling on when she wore a jellyfish-inspired outfit to face Antonia Ruzic of Croatia in their first-round match at the Australian Open.
Entering Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, the 28-year-old tennis player’s look consisted of a pleated miniskirt over wide-legged trousers, a wide-brimmed hat with a white veil and a parasol. Jellyfish-esque elements were also incorporated into her on-court outfit, which featured a watery turquoise and green palette and soft frills on the warm-up jacket and dress, alluding to tentacles.
As Osaka told Vogue before the match, which she went on to win 6-3, 3-6, 6-4, the inspiration came when she was reading a storybook to her two-year-old daughter, Shai: “Reading to my daughter, discovering beauty in unexpected places like the underwater world, working with artists who care about meaning – those moments have all shaped the way I see this expression now.”
It is the outcome of a collaboration between Nike, Osaka, her longtime creative collaborator Marty Harper and the London-based couturier Robert Wun, who has previously dressed stars such as Beyoncé, Cardi B and Ariana Grande.
Wun, who is reportedly a big tennis fan, had been inspired by Osaka for one of his previous collections. “One of the looks from my fall 2024 collection was inspired by her moment at court, when a butterfly landed on her face mid-match,” he told Vogue, referencing the moment during the 2021 Australian Open, a tournament she went on to win, when a butterfly landed on her face in her third-round match against Tunisian Ons Jabeur. Wun described it as “a simple, beautiful scene that went viral as she gently placed it aside. I wanted to revisit that story and weave it into this design and collaboration.” The design features butterflies on top of the hat and parasol.
Over the years, tennis has had its share of noteworthy fashion moments. From Serena Williams in a Virgil Abloh x Nike tutu dress at the 2018 US Open to Suzanne Lenglen and her hemlines to Anne White, who wore a white catsuit to play at Wimbledon in 1985, and was told not to wear it again. In recent years, heralded by Jannik Sinner wearing a duffel bag covered in Gucci’s GG monogram for his changing room to court walk at Wimbledon, the idea of tennis having its own version of a “catwalk” has been cemented. The NBA has its “tunnel fashion”, with players dressing to the designer nines to walk into the arena ahead of a game, the Premier League has its bus to changing rooms runway, and all tennis tournaments have the changing room to courtside seat saunter.
Osaka is aware of tennis’s sartorial chops. Speaking to Vogue, she said: “When I look back at the players who came before me, I think about how those moments – those looks – have become memories that live forever. So much of the time, other people get to write our stories for us.” Of her jellyfish-inspired ensemble, she added: “This felt like a moment where I could write a little bit of my own.”
But this feels like it broke new ground. As Vogue noted: “Haute couture has never been worn in this way in a live sports setting.”
Despite having toyed with style in the past – perhaps most playfully via bedazzled Labubu doll keychains worn to her matches – this feels like Osaka’s most dramatic style moment yet. Speaking to Vogue of a newfound confidence with clothes, Osaka said: “Fashion, for me, really opened up when I stopped thinking about how it would be received and started thinking about how it made me feel. The biggest shift really has been realising that style doesn’t have to be loud to be powerful. It can be quiet, emotional, layered. That realisation changed everything for me.”
But, Osaka to one side, the jellyfish is also a (supporting) star of the show, and it’s not the first time the otherworldly ocean creatures have had a moment of heightened popularity on land. In 2024, jellyfish inspired everything from haircuts to lamps to makeup and couture dresses.
Their silhouettes are a gift to spectacle. As scientist-turned-science writer Juli Berwald, author of Spineless: the Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, told the Guardian in 2024, around the time of the “jellyfish trend”: “Anyone with a sense of aesthetic would have to pause and say, ‘wow, what is that?’” Plus, their grace of movement feels like something a tennis player might want to replicate – not to mention that signalling you have a sting – which can’t be bad from a sports psychology point of view, either.
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