Williams wore white beads in her hair when she first won the US Open in 1999 (right). Her four-year-old daughter Olympia (left) followed that example when she watched her mother play at the 2022 edition of the tournament.
Williams said of the faux-leather catsuit she wore for the 2002 US Open: "Nobody is ever going to tell me what to wear. If you don’t have a decent shape, this isn’t the outfit to have. It makes me run faster and jump higher." The outfit caused some debate at the time and those discussions have been the subject of academic papers on the portrayal of black sportspeople in the media.
Williams says her outfit at the 2004 US Open is what sealed her as a fashion icon in tennis. She had switched to Nike from Puma and reminisced to Vogue that she “wanted more pizazz”, inspired by Andre Agassi wearing denim shorts. “I said, ‘I wanna wear a jeans skirt’,” she explained. Nike threw in some boots which could be zipped off so that by the time she played she was just wearing normal tennis shoes.
Williams wore a backless dress on her way to winning the 2015 Australian Open, saying it was designed to show "you can be beautiful and powerful at the same time".
Williams said the outfit she wore at the Australian Open the following year was a design she sketched herself to "bring pop culture into tennis".
According to Williams, the catsuit she wore at the 2018 French Open made her feel like a "queen from Wakanda", in reference to the Black Panther movie. She said it helped her cope with the issue of blood clots, which almost cost her her life giving birth. But later in 2018, tournament organisers introduced a stricter dress code so that she would be banned from wearing it in future.
At the 2019 French Open, Williams warmed up in a cape with the words 'mother, champion, queen, goddess’ written on it. "It was just to remind everyone that they can be champions and are queens. So I love that about it," she said. "It is a lot to carry, but so is being Serena Williams."
Williams wore a one-legged, black, pink and red catsuit at the 2021 Australian Open, which she said was a tribute to late American track and field icon Florence Griffith-Joyner.
In her first-round win at the 2022 US Open, Williams wore a figure skating-inspired dress with a six-layered skirt to represent her six singles titles at the tournament. "I had six layers to represent the six wins, but I took four out because it was too heavy," Williams, whose shoes were diamond-encrusted, said after her victory.
