Naomi Osaka’s US Open Style Connects Tennis, Fashion and Allen Iverson

Naomi Osaka enters the court wearing a hooded top and flowing white skirt.

Naomi Osaka brought two distinct fashion statements to her August 31 entrance at the US Open: a dramatic white walkout look and, underneath it, a black playing outfit she described as a tribute to Allen Iverson. Together, they put basketball’s influence on personal style into a tennis setting.

The US Open’s official account of the entrance describes a distressed hooded top covered with headlines and photographs from Osaka’s career, paired with a flowing tulle skirt. The contrast is the point: the upper half carries the look of a personal archive, while the skirt gives the arrival the scale of an occasion.

Her explanation of the Iverson connection went beyond borrowing from another sport. Osaka credited him with changing conversations about how athletes dress and express themselves. The tournament also placed her outfit within Nike’s basketball-inspired approach to this year’s US Open.

Read that way, the entrance is less a costume change than a statement about authorship. The headlines are about Osaka, but she is the person choosing how to wear them. Turning public coverage into part of an outfit offers a different relationship to those images: the subject becomes the stylist of her own story.

The pairing also resists a narrow definition of sportswear. A hood and a sweeping skirt can share the same entrance without needing to look as though they came from the same dress code. The playing kit serves a different purpose, yet the reference to Iverson connects it to the larger presentation.

Osaka is not the only player carrying that crossover into Flushing. In its earlier fashion report, the tournament highlighted Taylor Townsend’s Knicks-inspired collection and the basketball-style mesh worn by Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka during mixed doubles. The shared references help place Osaka’s individual tribute within a broader visual theme, without making every player’s outfit the same statement.

PowerPage’s look at Cardi B’s Grow-Good campaign follows another use of familiar personal imagery in a public-facing creative project. Osaka’s setting is different, but the question is similar: who gets to shape the story attached to a recognizable face?

See the tournament’s photo gallery for the entrance and on-court looks together. The most interesting part is not choosing which outfit wins. It is seeing how Osaka makes both belong to the same person.