At this year’s US Open, Serena Williams and Anna Wintour were among the high-profile figures in the stands. Days later, New York Fashion Week opened across Manhattan.
That is not an accident, and it is not just a feeling. According to communications firm Weber Shandwick, the US Open generated 690% more online coverage than New York Fashion Week last year. Sports vs fashion week is no longer a close contest. Tennis, not the runway, is where fashion conversation actually happens now.
Here is what is driving that, and how big it has actually gotten.
Fashion Rearranged Its Calendar Around Tennis
A 690% coverage gap is hard to argue with, and fashion itself has responded. Starting in 2025, the US Open began running the week before New York Fashion Week instead of overlapping with it. The tournament now functions as an unofficial preview for the shows that follow, rather than competing with them for the same two weeks of attention.
Put simply: the industry rearranged its own calendar around where people were actually looking. What players and celebrities wear courtside now shapes the mood editors carry into the tents days later, not the other way around.
The Look Has a Name: Tenniscore
The look driving this has a name: tenniscore. Pleated skirts, polos, preppy tailoring. It has been building for years, not months, and by 2025 it had racked up more than 20 million views on TikTok under that tag alone.
Pop culture gave it a real push. The 2024 film Challengers is widely credited with taking tenniscore from a niche athletic look into something people search for by name, and that search interest has kept climbing through 2026. Luxury houses like Chanel and Acne Studios have since folded tennis-inspired pieces into their own collections. The traditional fashion machine is now copying the stands, not the other way around.
Athletes Are Getting the Campaigns Models Used to Get
The clearest sign of the shift is who fashion brands are choosing to represent them. Kylian Mbappé is the face of Dior’s Sauvage fragrance and its ready-to-wear line. Lautaro Martínez, who captains Inter Milan, is a global ambassador for the Italian menswear house Canali. Serena Williams has spent years building a genuine design partnership with Off-White and Nike, not just lending her name to a product.
The reasoning, according to people inside the luxury industry, is simple: athletes come with a built-in story of discipline and earned success that reads as more real than traditional celebrity glamour. That is exactly what played out at this year’s US Open, where Williams and Federer, both making high-profile returns to the tournament, sat with Wintour and turned courtside seating into a front-row moment.
The Money Tells the Same Story
Attention is one thing. Money confirms it. The global sneaker market, sport and fashion’s biggest overlap, now brings in more than $100 billion a year. Athlete sponsorship deals in 2026 range from around $500 for small influencer arrangements up to $500,000 or more for headline campaigns, covering everything from golf apparel to athlete-founded streetwear brands like NBA player Russell Westbrook’s Honor the Gift.
New York Fashion Week, by comparison, generates roughly $887 million to $900 million a year for the city, by the most recent official estimates, and that figure has barely moved in a decade. Fashion Week isn’t shrinking. It has simply stopped growing while sports-driven style has kept climbing.
Why Tennis, Specifically
Tennis has a few advantages other sports don’t. There’s no team uniform in the crowd, so spectators dress themselves, which turns the stands into an actual style showcase instead of a sea of jerseys. Its look, clean, preppy, a little old-money, happens to match exactly what fashion has been chasing for the past few years anyway. And tennis isn’t rising alone: padel and pickleball have both grown fast as social, low-stakes ways to be active since the pandemic, feeding a younger, broader audience into the same aesthetic.
Tennis, in other words, looked like a fashion shoot before fashion ever showed up to it.
The Takeaway
Tennis is the clearest example of this shift, but it isn’t a one-off. The same forecast that flagged the 690% coverage gap points to a broader move: style authority is drifting away from traditional fashion institutions and toward live sport in general. Courtside is doing what the front row used to do.
Whether that lasts, or fades once this generation of tennis stars ages out, is an open question. Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner draw a younger crowd than Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic ever did, and some of this may be tied to them specifically. But for now, the direction is clear: for the first time in decades, the biggest fashion story of the season is happening on a tennis court, not a runway.
Sources
New York City Economic Development Corporation, via Senate JEC / Malay Mail archival reporting on NYFW’s annual economic impact.
Weber Shandwick. Predicting the Unpredictable: The Top 10 Cultural Trends and Moments of 2026
Heuritech. Tenniscore Trend in 2025: When Elegance Meets Sport
WWD / Yahoo Sports. The Trends Shaping 2026 U.S. Open Style: Tenniscore, Athleisure and More
Who What Wear. Every Stylish Moment From the 2026 US Open So Far
Harper’s Bazaar / Yahoo Shopping. What to Wear to the US Open
Sports Today. Athletes and Fashion: The New Frontier of Athlete Lifestyle Brands
OpenSponsorship. Sports Sponsorship in 2026: 7 Reasons It Drives ROI
