Fashion and tennis have long been successful partners. Can beauty join the game, too?
Many tennis players competing at Wimbledon will go home heartbroken this week, but when it comes to fashion, the tournament has many winners. This year’s edition of the famed British tennis championship has already been a fashion showcase, including with musician Arlo Parks wearing Thom Browne and “Brat” singer Charli XCX in a lacy Beaufille dress.
Fashion is no stranger to the value of the tennis court, but this year, beauty is increasingly making a play for the tenniscore crowd. Lancôme tapped rising Polish tennis star Iga Świątek as an ambassador in April, while La Roche-Posay teamed up with Italian wonderkid Jannik Sinner in February. In May, E.l.f. launched a partnership with legend Billie Jean King to promote corporate diversity. Rather than going the sponsorship route, Serena Williams, perhaps contemporary tennis’s most influential figure, launched her makeup line Wyn Beauty this spring. Luca Guadagnino’s tennis-themed film, “Challengers,” amid costumes designed by Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson and product placement from the likes of Uniqlo, had a beauty moment, too: Zendaya’s character, Tashi Duncan, is shown applying Augustinus Bader’s $190 body cream in a scene in the film.
“People love that tennis has become such a performative thing,” said Chidinma Asonye, chief commercial officer at Wyn Beauty. “The fashion is incredible, and I think the beauty is incredible. The self-expression, celebrating the strength of people — those are all things that people can resonate with.”
Athletes are no longer limited to partnerships with an obvious connection to sports, like sneakers or sports drinks. Increasingly, they’re branching into the beauty and lifestyle world. That includes traditional spokesperson deals, but also, more are debuting their own companies. They include Williams with Wyn Beauty and David Beckham with his newly-launched wellness brand.
“Where [athletes] can expand their career and their reach is actually through brand deals and sponsorships,” said Asonye. “You see in the [basketball] tunnels now that everyone is showing their fashion moment and their runway moment. And that’s been a great thing to bring more mainstream interest into sports, and vice versa.”
But while fashion has a long history in tennis to draw from, from Andre Agassi’s denim shorts to Serena Williams’s Off-White tutu, beauty has perhaps less of an obvious place on the tennis court. Subsequently, it faces an uphill battle to generate the same online excitement.
According to beauty analytics company Spate, searches for tenniscore related to beauty have been negligible, with the hair category offering the biggest opportunity. Spate found that the hashtag #hairinspo used alongside “tenniscore” showed a week-over-week growth of 12.7%, with a total of 26.3K views, for the week ending July 7.
Fashion, meanwhile, has had a far higher return on tenniscore. According to data analytics company Launchmetrics, Zendaya’s tenniscore looks from her “Challengers” press tour garnered millions in media impact value, the firm’s proprietary metric measuring media placements. Her Loewe tennis-ball dress worn to the film’s Australian premiere alone earned $8.8 million in MIV. In June, the actress was named an ambassador for On, making her the shoe brand’s first non-athlete celebrity sponsor. This week, she teamed up with tennis icon and fellow On ambassador Roger Federer for a campaign showing the two battling it out over a game of “air tennis.”
Zendaya’s tenniscore success is indicative that brands don’t exclusively need to turn to actual players to capture the tennis craze. Morgan Riddle has built an audience of more than 800,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok while following her boyfriend, professional tennis player Taylor Fritz, as he competes at the likes of the Australian Open and Monte-Carlo Masters. The 26-year-old influencer has snagged social media partnerships with beauty brands including Dior and Charlotte Tilbury and hosted a YouTube series with Wimbledon following attendees of the tournament. Influencer Paige Lorenze, girlfriend to tennis player Tommy Paul, has similarly worked with the likes of Summer Fridays and L’Oréal and was named Chief Lifestyle Officer for the Miami Open earlier this year.
As Riddle told her followers, the more “traditional” tennis followers are not fans of her partnership with Wimbledon, whose partners have largely been limited to luxury brands like Rolex and Ralph Lauren. Wyn Beauty has also tried to break out of tennis’s elite image by working with Ulta as its exclusive retail partner.
“They felt like they had that same DNA as we did, in terms of inclusivity and accessibility and not [being] some elitist brand where you had to be in the in-crowd,” said Asonye. “We wanted our products and our price points to be super rookie-friendly.”
Paul and Fritz were knocked out in the quarter-finals of the men’s singles tournament at Wimbledon, but both of them, and presumably their Instagram-famous girlfriends, will join stars like Coco Gauff as they head to Paris for the Olympics in the coming weeks. Asonye said Wyn is already planning for brand activations during the U.S. Open in August. The tennis season — and the influential opportunities that come with it — is far from over.
