You know the Miu Miu skirt. The micro-mini, low-rise, pleated one with the raw hem that showed up on the Spring/Summer 2022 runway and then immediately took over the internet, appearing on every street style blog and every woman at brunch who had never held a tennis racket in her life. It was the first glimpse of evidence that the "club sport" aesthetic — once the exclusive domain of country clubs and tennis pros — was officially breaking out of the gates.
Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2022 — the micro-mini that started it all. Image: The Cut
We're a few years into the fallout now, and it’s worth taking stock because this didn’t turn out to be a micro-trend that peaked and faded. It got bigger. And it’s being driven by people with good taste.
The Runway Is a Court Now
Casablanca is probably the best place to start. When Charaf Tajer founded the label in 2018, he more or less invented a category he called après-sport, which is not sportswear or athleisure but the after. Designing around the moment you walk off the clay court and sit down at a table with a glass of something cold. He makes silk shirts with hand-painted tennis motifs and saturated colors, drawing on a Mediterranean sensibility that assumes you spent the morning doing something physical and beautiful and now you’re going to enjoy the rest of your day looking like it. Casablanca isn’t referencing sport ironically; it’s arguing that the social, leisurely, European version of sport is one of the most aesthetically rich worlds fashion can draw from.
Thom Browne has been making a version of this argument for longer. His Tennis Pro Shop collections—shrunken blazers in white cotton piqué with navy grosgrain trim and pleated skirts that look tennis but say dinner party—treat the vocabulary of club sport as high fashion without any “IYKYK” winking. He’s not borrowing from sport so much as insisting it was always this good.
Casablanca Pre-Spring 2024 campaign — monied, athletic tennis elegance at its finest. Image: Anne of Carversville
And then Lacoste's Fall/Winter 2024 show happened. Pelagia Kolotouros’s first collection as creative director went straight back to the brand’s 1920s tennis roots with sharp tailoring and bold graphics, treating the crocodile like sport heritage instead of the preppy shorthand it had become.
Even Ellesse is back. The 1980s Italian ski-and-tennis brand that your cool aunt wore is en vogue again because the appetite for vintage athletic wear is enormous right now.
So that’s the runway side. But where it gets more interesting is how it’s bleeding into the culture.
The Challengers Effect and the US Open Stands
We just wrote about when Challengers came out in April 2024 and the ripple effect it gave off through the zeitgeist. Putting Zendaya at the center of it all and then dressing her beautifully felt like the most compelling thing happening in culture. And it set off a tidal wave.
Zendaya's Challengers press tour, styled by Law Roach — including the viral Loewe tennis ball heels. Image: Vogue
The US Open last September was maybe the clearest snapshot of where all this has landed. Taylor Swift showed up to the men’s final in a cherry gingham Reformation dress that wasn’t tennis whites but was undeniably in conversation with the setting. Kendall Jenner wore an Alaïa polo dress that one outlet called "a rich-girl twist on classic tennis whites," which is a very accurate description of what's happening broadly.
Kendall Jenner at the US Open 2024 in Alaïa tennis whites. Image: Yahoo Entertainment
The stands at a major tournament are now a fashion event. People are dressing for the sport without dressing in the sport, and that distinction matters because it means the aesthetic has fully detached from the activity. You don’t need to play to participate in the look.
Hailey Bieber’s been here for a while. Her FILA Spring 2024 campaign paired vintage track jackets with modern tennis skirts. She recreated Princess Diana’s 1990s gym look years ago with the oversized crewneck and bike shorts, and it landed because Diana understood something that took the rest of fashion twenty years to catch up to: what you wear to and from sport is as considered as anything else in your wardrobe.
Hailey Bieber x FILA Spring 2024 campaign — tenniscore at its most polished. Image: The Zoe Report
Why It Resonates Now
Here is what we think is actually going on. The last few years of "quiet luxury" trained everyone’s eye toward clean lines and muted palettes, quality over logos. But quiet luxury was static. It was for standing still and looking expensive. The club sport aesthetic takes that same sensibility and adds movement. It assumes you’re going to do something today. Maybe it’s tennis at 7am, maybe it’s a walk, maybe it’s just errands, but the clothes account for a body that moves, and they look good doing it.
There's also something about the specific nostalgia it's pulling from. Not the 1990s minimalism that dominated for so long, but earlier than that.
Björn Borg in Fila at Wimbledon — the original club sport aesthetic. Image: Fila Archive
The 1970s with Björn Borg in pinstripe Fila and wooden rackets. The 1980s with Ellesse on Guillermo Vilas and the country club as a social institution. There’s a warmth to that era’s sportswear that the hyper-technical stuff of the modern era completely lost. The new wave is bringing back all the details: the piping, the contrast trim, the polo collar, the pleated skirt.
The women wearing this stuff aren’t “pretending” to be athletes. They’re building wardrobes that work for lives that include sport as a normal, daily, joyful thing. The pleated skirt at the court and the pleated skirt at the farmer’s market are the same skirt. The aesthetic isn’t about looking like you play a sport; it’s about looking like you live a life that has play built into it.
We’ve been watching this build for a while now, and it’s not going anywhere. If anything, it’s going to get better: premium fabrics, intentional silhouettes, timeless colorways. The best version of this trend isn’t a trend at all. It’s just how people want to dress now.
