September 6, 2023 |
Nineteen ninety-four was a big year for Venus Williams. It was the year that the sporting legend went pro, aged only 14, and won her first game after graduating from juniors tennis. It was the year that introduced the world to the surname that would come to dominate the sport for the next three decades. And it was the year Williams revealed her talent for fashion design – we just didn’t know it.
“My mom made the skirts for my first professional match and I had three different ones,” she explains. “I regret the fabric I picked, but it was what it was. One of them, I recall, was like a geometric [pattern]. The other ones were tiny little flowers. I’m not sure why [I chose them], but…” she pauses, “actually, I think if I had chosen a better top, it could have made it all go together. But still, I mean, I was 14, I didn’t even have my braces off yet, so I can’t be too hard on myself!”
Almost 30 years later and her off-court passion is taking centre stage once again thanks to a new high-profile collaboration with another sporting legend, Lacoste. Williams was announced as its brand ambassador last year and their first eagerly anticipated collection is about to drop.
“I’ve been in the [Lacoste] family for about two years now and I have really spent a lifetime loving the brand,” she says, admiringly. “I love the direction that it has been going in, especially from a design standpoint. I was just in awe and Pinning all of it and studying all of it. I was really going gaga for it.”
If that sounds like music to Lacoste’s ears, imagine the sounds coming out of their HQ when Williams personally got in contact. “I literally just reached out and [said I] wanted to know more, and meet the design team, because I was so inspired by it,” she says. “And that’s how it started. I think we all had a mutual admiration for each other.”
Williams describes the collection as existing at “the intersection of sport and fashion” – something that chimes nicely with the brand founded by René Lacoste in 1933. The Parisian was a hugely successful tennis player who won no fewer than seven Grand Slams in five years in the late 1920s.
“When you think about the innovation that René had [when he decided] to shorten his sleeves, that’s something we take for granted these days but was actually pioneering [nearly] 100 years ago,” she says. “Those were the sorts of things we kept in mind for this collection; we have that innovation with performance and athleisure elements, and then we also have tailoring. It really runs the gamut of how we live.”
Speaking to me from the back of a car en route to shoot the collection for 10 in New York, the way Williams talks about design is as passionate and natural as her game. She has, she says, been fortunate to be able to dress how she wants to on court. “Not every player gets that chance and that’s been the ultimate luxury and freedom to be able to do that.” As a result, she knows exactly how she wants people to feel in the clothes she creates. “It’s so important to feel confident in what you wear, because when you don’t, all you can think about is how uncomfortable you feel.” She understands the power of thoughtful and well-made clothes.
“I suit up and get ready for battle when I’m out there on court,” she continues. “I guess most people aren’t battling, but when you walk into the gym or wherever it is, there’s a bit of a battle and you want to be prepared for it. You want to make sure that you’ve got the right fit and the right fabrics, everything you need to conquer that moment where you’re moving.”
It all adds up to a lifetime of experience that has resulted in her creative approach, not only with Lacoste but with her own athleisure brand, EleVen, which she launched in 2007.
“I think that the whole design process is definitely [about] looking inside of yourself because the greatest inspiration comes from within,” she says. “We all have something unique inside of us that we need to pull out and understand how that resonates with other people. How does that resonate with the rest of the world? How do you communicate that in terms of design?”
At EleVen,Williams uses everything she’s learnt in sport to inform business decisions. “Sport is the best teacher for business – that is for real. I’m so glad I learned those lessons on the court without even realising: discipline, setting goals, winning, losing, building a team… those are all things you learn in sport. It’s literally the same in business. I think athletes take that discipline, focus and determination straight to business. There are so many businesses that love hiring athletes, because they get it.”
It begs an obvious question. What kind of boss is Williams? “Way too much fun,” she says with a laugh. “Honestly, I’ve never asked anyone, so I have no idea what they would say. Hopefully, that would be what they would say!”
It’s humour backed up with an education that happened parallel to her tennis career. In 2007, Williams completed her associate degree in Fashion Design at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale then, in 2015, received a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from Indiana University East.
Of her business degree, she’s matter-of-fact about it. “I always wanted to bring credibility to everything I did. The more information you know, the better you can be at [something], and also the better leader you can be. So that’s why I did it. Of her return to education in general, it was a long- held passion, having conquered the world of tennis.
“I wanted to go to school and loved the arts,” she says. “I [had been] playing professional tennis for a while. I think I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do off the court and I would have chosen every creative art; [fashion] is where I landed. I don’t know if I [would want to] do it differently or do it over, maybe I’d want to go for architecture. Who knows? I could choose 90 different things I’d like to do but there’s only so much time.”
For the record, Williams also owns a successful interiors design firm, V Starr, and at 43 years old, has already made more than the most of her time.
Born Venus Ebony Starr Williams in June 1980 to Richard and Oracene, her prodigy-turned-superstar story is one for the ages. Having moved with her parents and four sisters from Compton, California, where she was born, to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1993, aged only 13, to pursue her dream of becoming a professional tennis player, within a year she had secured a five-year $12 million sponsorship contract with Reebok (that’s $24 million, or £18.7 million, in today’s money).
It was during this time that her sister Serena, only 15 months younger than Venus, started to show her own prowess and by the close of 1999 they were the reigning doubles champions at the French and US Opens. It was the beginning of a professional partnership that would secure their status as one of the greatest doubles teams of all time (they won 14 Grand Slam titles together).
Following Williams’s first two Grand Slam victories in 2000, at the US Open and Wimbledon, she signed another five-year deal with Reebok for $40 million – the largest endorsement package ever signed by a female athlete (coming out to £55 million in 2023). At the time, when he was asked if Venus was the “female response to Tiger Woods”, Reebok CMO Angel Martinez was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “We feel Venus is incomparable.”
Over the next two decades, she would go on to achieve dizzying triumphs, winning titles that are too numerous to list here but do include a record-breaking four Olympic gold medals, one in singles and three in doubles, which she played, of course, with her sister. In Grand Slam singles, the ultimate benchmark of tennis success, she won the US Open twice and an astonishing five Wimbledon singles titles in only eight years.
Not content with smashing world records, she smashed the glass ceiling, too. In 2006, after campaigning for equal prize money for men and women at Wimbledon and the French Open, she had a searing letter published in the Times in which she accused the London tournament of “treating women as second class” and said that the championships would be “on the wrong side of history” if they didn’t close the pay gap. A year later, both tournaments announced there would be equal prize money for all players in all rounds.
“To be honest, I had no plans on figuring out equal prize money when I got on [the WTA] Tour,” she says humbly. “I didn’t even know that it wasn’t happening. I think it’s just one of those things where you find yourself in a situation and then you’re just fighting for what you believe in. There’s no exact plan, just, ‘I’ve got to make this right.’ And I think when you find yourself in a situation like that, you stand up for what’s right. It was a great thing that was completely unplanned. I’m so glad it happened.”
For all her accolades, broken records and role model status, deciding what is her proudest achievement might take some thinking, but when I ask, Williams doesn’t miss a beat.
“Being a great big sister,” she says. “I’m only a big sister to one and it’s a job I take very seriously – so far, I’ve succeeded.” She and Serena continue to be “each other’s biggest fan and biggest supporters,” she says. “We believe in each other, possibly more than we believe in ourselves. And there’s nothing like having that [person] with you and by your side, [through] thick and thin, up and down.”
The duo’s mantras over the years have included, “‘move on it’, like when you see a great idea and move on it. Another was ‘see someone doing something great, do it too’,” she says. “That one we laughed a lot about, but it was very serious.”
Williams has no plans to stop moving. As well as her collections for Lacoste and EleVen, this year’s US Open is firmly in her sights, as are all the other major tournaments next year. “I think it’s okay to sit still,” she says. “I’ve spent my whole life working from a very young age, so I think for me sitting still is going to be something important and something I look forward to – but it’s just not now, it’s not yet.”
For now, her downtime includes watching Netflix dating series The Ultimatum: France at home in Florida (“I’m trying to improve my French; it’s not going the way I wanted it to, but I figure if I stick at it some good will come from it”), having her family around for dinner (they make up her dream dinner party list) and travelling more (Egypt and Thailand are on her wish list).
Recently, she travelled to Puglia to be a guest of honour at the Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda show, where she wore a floor-length pink lace gown. “I was not going for Barbie,” she laughs. “Other people are going crazy for that right now. But it all just ended up that way.”
Less go with the flow, more fail to prepare, prepare to fail, she is a fan of the mood board when it comes to her own style. “Oh, my style is always changing,” she says with a laugh. “Right now, [at the time of the interview] I’ve got pink hair and I’ve been only wearing pastels because it works with the hair. But then I’ll get this thing where I’m like, ‘Oh, I need a makeover!’ So I create a whole Pinterest board and what I think I want to look like and then, boom! There it is. I go through different phases.”
For someone of Williams’s successes and stature, the question of who she’d like to play her in a film of her life had always been a natural one. But that’s already under her belt, too. Immortalised in the 2021 Oscar-winning film King Richard, which depicted her father’s indefatigable pursuit of making first Venus and then Serena the tennis greats they became (the sisters served as executive producers), she was played by Saniyya Sidney, who Venus also chose to star with her in her first campaign for Lacoste last summer.
In one of the final scenes, when the young Venus plays Spanish legend and four-time Grand Slam winner Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, we see what would have been the second skirt that Williams spoke of designing all those years ago.“Unfortunately, I did not win that second [round] match,” she says, and so, alas, the world never saw the third skirt. Fast forward 29 years and lucky for us, we get to see the full Venus Williams fashion vision.
“I’m so happy with how everything’s going – all we can do I think is pull it out the park,” she says with a laugh, adding: “And I think we have.”
Issue 71 of 10 Magazine – FASHION, ICON, DEVOTEE – is on newsstands September 7. Pre-order your copy here. For the reveal of the inaugural issue of 10 USA, click here.
LACOSTE: VENUS WILLIAMS
Photographer JOHN GUERRERO
Fashion Editor CORNELIUS LAFAYETTE
Talent VENUS WILLIAMS
Text SCARLETT CONLON
Hair RO MORGAN at The Wall Group using Oribe
Make-up KARINA MILAN at The Wall Group using NARS and Danessa Myricks
Manicurist SHANI EVANS
Photographer’s assistants IAN RUTTER, SHEN WILLIAMS-COHEN, GRADY CORBITT
Digital technician HOPE CHRISTERSON
Fashion assistants ROWAN HARPER, ALEGRA OLOTU and ANNA NOSWORTHY
Tailor on set ANTHONY GARCIA
Social media editor DIANA TSUI
Executive producer WEI-LI WANG
Producer ANNA BLUNDELL
Image stylist co-ordinator ANNIK BLANCHI
Global PR, talents and influence DENIS BUFFART
Global PR, talents and influence director JEREMY PALLARES
Post Production SELECAO NYC
Special thanks to the LACOSTE BROADWAY STORE, clothing throughout by LACOSTE
