Before Serena and Venus, before Coco, before them all was Suzanne Lenglen. A French tennis player referred to as La Divina, she was a maverick on and off the courts, dominating in the 1910s and ’20s. Her stats are beyond impressive: six Wimbledon titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923; an eight-time Grand Slam title-winner in singles and 21 in total; and an undefeated doubles player with her partner, Elizabeth Ryan.
More than that, she was a fashion icon. Up until she hit the court in a breezy Patou-designed dress for a 1919 Wimbledon match, female tennis players were expected to play in “garden party attire,” writes Sunita Kumar Nair in her book ACE: The Times & Style of Tennis: full-length skirts, corsets, blouson-sleeved shirts. “Lenglen shed all that,” Nair writes. She wore a straight-line, drop-waist cap-sleeved dress with an accordion-pleat skirt, all of which allowed for freer movement. Made from white silk jersey, it was breathable and airy. A year later, she’d return to the tournament in a sleeveless dress with a shorter hem, head topped with a turban. Patou saw a spike in sales, and this very magazine wrote about the design, noting “the freedom, appropriateness, and excellence of its simple lines.”
“There’s this constant parallelism going on between society and tennis athletes,” Nair said in a recent interview. “And it was just really surprising to me that it remains the same, even today.”
She added, “Tennis as a sport is so reflective of the time.”
Radka Leitmeritz
In Nair’s richly illustrated book, she makes the case that tennis is, indeed, the most stylish sport. From Patou and Coco Chanel—who had a corner dedicated to athleticwear, including tennis, at her Deauville boutique dubbed Le Coin des Sports—to Lacoste and Coco Gauff’s recent partnership with Miu Miu, tennis and fashion have always been deeply intertwined. From its very origins in the late 1800s as a society game, its uniform spoke to matters of class and societal position. Tennis whites, Nair says, inferred “you are from a certain kind of echelon in life,” which gives you immediate access to buy separate sportswear. When we’re looking at the early 1900s, few people could actually afford to have whites because, practically speaking, keeping whites white actually really was really difficult at the time.”
Nair—whose last book, CBK from 2023, explored our fascination with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s style—organized this book not chronologically, but thematically, with three main sections: The Classic, The Mavericks, The Cool. Subchapters cover everything from designers (Ralph Lauren, Tory Burch, Yohji Yamamoto), to items (Skirts, Sweaters, Watches, even Tattoos), to players (Agassi, Osaka, Nadal). Throughout, she makes the case that the rarified sport has had an outsize impact on the broader culture, that its sportswear has bled over into the lives of those who are mere spectators or have little connection with the game at all. Who doesn’t recognize the little alligator patch on a sporty polo as Lacoste?
