Tennis Finally Built Its Tunnel Walk. Here’s What Came Out the Other Side.
The ATP hired a former GQ fashion director, quadrupled its style budget, and gave players a moment to actually be themselves off court. The results are exactly as interesting as you’d hope.
Look, tennis player fashion has been a specific kind of problem for a long time. Not a bad one, exactly. More like a missed opportunity. The sport produces some of the most globally recognizable athletes on earth, people who train their whole lives for a game that is, at its core, deeply aesthetic — the geometry of a court, the arc of a serve, the particular elegance of a good backhand slice. And for decades, those athletes walked into tournaments wearing whatever their sponsor sent them in a box.
The sponsor box is the enemy of personal style. It’s not that the clothes are bad — sometimes they’re great. It’s that they’re the same for everyone. Every Nike player shows up in the same Nike kit. Every Adidas player in the same Adidas kit. The individual disappears into the brand. You know who plays for what company. You don’t know anything about who they are when they’re not on court.
In 2026, the ATP decided to do something about it. And the person they called was Mobolaji Dawodu, former fashion director of GQ, the man who understood before most people did that the NBA’s tunnel walk had changed what it meant to be a professional athlete. His brief: give tennis its version of the moment.
THE NBA COMPARISON THAT ACTUALLY HOLDS UP
Why Tennis Player Fashion Needed a Tunnel Walk — And What That Actually Means
The NBA tunnel walk is one of the most culturally significant things that happened to professional sports in the last twenty years. Not because basketball players started wearing expensive clothes — they were already doing that — but because the league created a formal moment, a structured opportunity, for athletes to be seen as something other than what they do on the floor. LeBron James walking into an arena in a $4,000 suit is not just a fashion statement. It’s a claim about who he is, what his interests are, what kind of person exists inside the athlete.
Tennis didn’t have that. And the reason is structural. As Dawodu himself explained it: “The culture of tennis doesn’t allow style to show besides the style on the court. Mostly, we see players on media day where they’re dressed in their sponsors’ apparel. Unlike basketball, there is no home team where you can see them arriving at the stadium.”
The solution was the Athlete Arrivals — a new format launched at Indian Wells in 2026 where players walk into tournament venues in looks they’ve actually chosen, styled with Dawodu’s input, captured on camera and distributed through the tour’s social channels. Players worked with Dawodu in the weeks before each tournament to curate their looks. The results, at Indian Wells, were immediately interesting: Hermès suits, Issey Miyake pleated trousers, Stone Island cargo pants. Flavio Cobolli in a relaxed linen Brunello Cucinelli suit that managed to be the most “player who just won a match and is now going somewhere good for dinner” outfit anyone has worn to a tennis tournament.
“The NBA has a tunnel. I think it’s time for tennis to have a tunnel.”
Mobolaji Dawodu, former GQ Fashion Director · ATP Styling Consultant 2026
The Players Who Are Actually Leading the Tennis Player Fashion Conversation
The Athlete Arrivals are the infrastructure. The more interesting story is what individual players are already doing with the space fashion is giving them, and how that’s starting to reshape the way tennis is perceived by an audience that wasn’t previously paying attention.
Flavio Cobolli is the clearest example of someone who has thought about this more carefully than his peers. On court, he’s sponsored by On, the Swiss running brand that has made serious inroads into tennis. Off court, he’s not tied to any brand, which gives him freedom most players don’t have. “Before, it was more instinctive,” he said of his approach to style. “Now I pay more attention to the balance between comfort and style.” That sounds like a small shift. It isn’t. A player who has a philosophy about dressing is a player who understands that the way they appear off court is part of their brand, not an afterthought.
Carlos Alcaraz at the Australian Open wore a sleeveless green Nike look that instantly became a meme — the internet compared it to a Kim Possible villain — but the conversation about it was the point. People were talking about what a tennis player was wearing. That almost never happens. Jannik Sinner was less lucky: Nike sent him a mustard-colored set that he reportedly disliked enough to suggest he’d “get more involved” in the design process going forward. Which is its own kind of fashion statement.
Then there’s the pink moment. Sinner wore pink at Indian Wells and Miami, a deliberate callback to Roger Federer’s iconic pink Nike polo from Toronto in 2010. Aryna Sabalenka wore pink at both tournaments too — the same tournaments, the same color, a coincidence so aesthetically complete that it became a cultural conversation point. Carlos Alcaraz has worn so many pink and purple looks that his fanbase on social media created the “Pink Charly Club” to track and celebrate the trend. A fanbase-organized fan club for a color palette. That’s fashion as community building.
——— THE HISTORY ———
THEY DID THIS BEFORE – AND IT WAS INCREDIBLE
Tennis Player Fashion Has Been Here Before. It Just Forgot.
The current moment in tennis style is genuinely new, but it’s also a return. The sport produced some of the most iconically stylish athletes of the 20th century. Björn Borg and John McEnroe in the 1970s — the short-shorts, the headbands, the sense that these were people who existed in a world larger than a baseline — are still on mood boards for European designers doing retro sportswear capsules today. Andre Agassi in the late ’80s and ’90s wore denim shorts on court, had Nike build an entire marketing ecosystem around his personality, and became the first tennis player to feel like a genuine pop culture figure since Borg.
Then something happened. The sport got corporate. The kits got standardized. The players got polished into interchangeable brand ambassadors. Roger Federer was immaculate but conservative. Nadal was his own kind of aesthetic — the sleeveless shirts, the piratas — but always intensely functional. The generation that followed them dressed, largely, in what they were given.
What’s different now is the structural change. Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe leaving Nike for BOSS and Lululemon respectively — explicitly because they wanted to be “the big fish in a small pond” rather than one of forty players in the same swoosh — signals something real about how the current generation of players thinks about brand relationships. Jack Draper at the Burberry Spring/Summer 2026 show in London, not because Burberry paid him to be there but because he wanted to be there. These are players who have a point of view.
The brands are responding. Wilson, better known for rackets than apparel, has been expanding its clothing line since 2021 and now dresses players like Alex de Minaur and Marta Kostyuk. Vuori, the California-based wellness brand, has entered the tennis space. Newer, smaller brands are realizing that a tennis player wearing your clothes at a press conference reaches an audience that no traditional sports sponsorship can touch — an audience that’s increasingly fashion-literate and increasingly attached to specific players as cultural figures.
“Fashion is deeply rooted in the culture of tennis. This presents a unique opportunity to position tennis within wider cultural conversations.”
Andrew Walker, ATP SVP of Brand & Marketing · 2026
Tennis has always had the raw material for a great style story. The athleticism, the globalism, the individual nature of the sport, the particular mix of old money and new blood that the tour carries with it. What it lacked was permission — the structural moment, the institutional support, the signal from the tour that getting dressed well was not a distraction from the sport but an extension of it.
In 2026, that permission has arrived. The tunnel exists. Dawodu is in the building. Players who want to be interesting off court — and there are more of them than anyone knew — finally have a format that lets them.
Taylor Fritz showed up to Indian Wells in Hermès. Flavio Cobolli wore Brunello Cucinelli linen. Someone wore Stone Island cargo pants to a tennis tournament and made it work.
It’s just the beginning. Watch this space.
