In 1936, American sportswriter Paul Gallico declared that female athletes “should never, never go all out so that they breathe hard and audibly and get moustaches of perspiration on their upper lips.” According to him, it was “a lady’s business to look beautiful. There are hardly any sports in which she seems to be able to do this.” At the time, women who played sports were not taken seriously, evaluated not on performance but on presentation. If a woman’s job was to ‘look beautiful’, how could she possibly play well? It must be impossible to do both.
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82 years later, when Serena Williams wore a custom-made black catsuit by Nike at the French Open in 2018, her choice of attire generated much outrage. The athlete went on to win her first grand slam match after giving birth, but the catsuit? It was banned. “You have to respect the game and the place,” said Bernard Giudicelli, president of the French Tennis Federation at the time.
The relationship between female athletes and fashion is complicated, which is surprising because when it comes to male athletes and fashion, there’s not all that much to say. Of course, it’s almost always the women whose bodies and choices are being policed. In 2005, Sania Mirza became the first Indian woman to win a WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) Tour title, but every headline mentioned the fatwa that had been issued against her for wearing a skirt and a T-shirt—not unusual to wear while playing racquet sports. With so much scrutiny around what female athletes wear, it’s no wonder that many have kept fashion at arm’s length. To embrace it was to risk not being taken seriously. For years, seriousness meant being more masculine, more pared back, more focused—not distracted by the frivolity that is fashion.
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