Tennis has always had an air of refinement – in no small part thanks to its de facto uniform of preppy polos and pristine whites. A new guard of players, however, has succeeded at serving up runway attitude on the court, making the grand slam tournaments forums for bold personal style.
One of the most notable players in this arena is, of course, Coco Gauff, the American court star who, at the bafflingly young age of 22, has already established herself among the sport’s true greats. As well as her potent serve and feisty backhand, she’s also earned a reputation for acing her on-court looks – as will be evidenced just next week, when Gauff steps onto the grass in SW19 for her latest Wimbledon tournament.
.jpg)
The looks she’ll be making her run for the biggest trophy in tennis in are the latest fruits of a longstanding partnership with New England sports titans New Balance and Italian fashion house Miu Miu – the eagle-eyed among you will also clock her as one of the faces of the latter’s spring/summer 2026 campaign. The relationship between Gauff and the two brands began last summer, when she wore a trio of graphic ensembles to a series of WTA 1000 tournaments in Rome, Berlin and Cincinnati.
“It was very intentional,” she shares over a Zoom call from Paris, where she was gearing up to defend her status as the French Open’s reigning women’s singles champion. “A lot of players seem to save their best outfits for the slams, which is great because they’re our biggest tournaments. But it was important for me to really show up in places where fashion is so important, like Rome.” It was there that she sported a zip-front A-line dress, bisected into contrasting blocks of navy and white. The look, naturally, stoked fans’ appetites. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, we want to see a Grand Slam kit!’ So I was like, ‘Okay!’,” and so the conversations around outfitting Gauff for the greatest of all the grand slams began.
From the outset, though, there were key parameters that the tennis player and the brands’ respective design teams had to keep within. “Obviously Wimbledon is the most traditional, if not the biggest event we have in tennis,” she says, noting the tournament’s infamously strict dress code for competing players. “You have to wear all white, so there were some limitations.” Still, this hardly posed a creative block, inspiring Gauff to pursue a more minimalist direction, while nodding to a particularly popular look from her own archive. “Last year, there was one New Balance look that I wore that some people compared to a wedding dress,” she laughs. “I guess there’s something romantic about the colour white…”
