Naomi Osaka is apparently not an adequate fashion star. She had to prove it by wearing a gown at the Roland Garros, now the commercialised vanity of a tennis ace’s runway

Earlier today in Paris, Naomi Osaka wore a black gilet and a floor-skimming tulle skirt, also black, on Court Suzanne-Lenglen at Roland Garros. There was no red carpet laid out for her, just the crushed red brick dust in that distinctive shade of terracotta. But she deemed it necessary to swish onto the court looking, from the waist down, like a Sicilian widow. Exactly how one should turn up for a sunny first-round tennis match. She even had time to pose for the cameramen before she went to the side to dramatically remove her skirt—a garment she made sure to note after the match (a 7-6, 6-3 victory against Laura Siegemund) was a custom-made piece by the Swiss designer Kevin Germanier. Couture on the court. Time and place. We remember them fondly. They don’t exist anymore, of course, but it’s nice to reminisce.

For a lot of atas tennis purists and grounded competing athletes, a Grand Slam court isn’t a stage for championing a lesser-known dress designer. To us, the moment recalls Madonna wearing Olivier Theyskens in 1998, but the occasion was (the now defunct) VH1 Fashion Awards. Turning a premier athletic event (which is essentially work space for Ms Osaka) into a billboard for a designer’s upcycled couture project was utterly gratuitous and unbearable to watch, especially when the logistics of that fashion display and the garment’s removal actively slowed down the game itself. It was not as if she has no other fashion platform to flaunt. Ms Osaka already attends many fashion events that allow her to show off her fashion, more than any of he competing players, combined. Yet, she still needed Roland Garros as Avenue Montaigne. Early this month,she was at the Met Gala wearing a highly conceptual, 9-kilogram Robert Wun structural piece, executing a staged ‘skin-shedding’ performance on that red carpet. She is a front-row fixture at Paris Fashion Week, a co-chair of global fashion events, and has graced the covers of the world’s leading style magazines. Seriously, what’s little old Roland Garros?

In Nike for the match. Screen shot: rolandgarros/Instagram

We wouldn’t want, of course, reality to intrude on this little festival of self-satisfaction. But let’s convene with reality for a while longer. Some people say that if Chanel can stage a Métiers d’art in a subway, why can’t Ms. Osaka wear a ballgown to a tennis court? The irony is that both are performances, but one is licensed to rewrite the script, the other is bound to play within it. The Roland Garros courts are not a neutral stage, but a site of watchable labour, governed by rules and expectations. To import a ballgown there is not just aesthetic play; it’s a disruption of professional codes. Unlike Chanel in a subway, Ms. Osaka isn’t re‑authoring a backdrop; she’s bending the optics of her own workplace. That makes the act less defensible if we insist on respecting the sanctity of professional environments. We wouldn’t expect Anna Wintour—a known tennis fan—to wear an abbreviated white tennis skirt to her office at One World Trade Center.

The machinery of personal branding is entirely transparent. You really could not ignore the calculation behind the presence. On Instagram, Naomi Osaka later labelled her look “Court-ure”. The obvious pun itself tells you everything you need to know about the mindset behind it. It is a clear manifestation of the main character ethos—a premeditated marketing tagline disguised as a casual Instagram caption. It proves that the entire display was never a spontaneous burst of personal style. It was a fully packaged, highly corporate brand push that was disguised as an athlete’s vulnerable self-expression. Sure, she posed on a court, but this was not the court of Louis XVI. When you treat a tennis court like the Hall of Mirrors, you are establishing a hierarchy. You are saying to your opponent, to the umpire, and to the audience: “Your time is secondary to my presentation.” Sadly, when you finally ascend to a certain elevation of success, an extraordinary atmospheric shift occurs. The external world ceases to exist as a collection of independent variables and is instead reassigned as your personal stage management crew. It really is all about you.