Maya Joint, a 20-year-old Australian tennis player, spent just 70 minutes on court as she fell in the first round of Roland Garros.
It was more than enough time for the redhead to deliver the French Open tournament’s first fashion statement in her wraparound Oakley sunglasses.
These glasses have been a signature for Joint. They make her look somewhere between a skeet shooter and a Star Trek background character.
Last Monday (May 25), as temperatures reached the low 90s in Paris, there was something cinematic about watching the court’s hot red clay reflect off Joint’s blue-tint lenses.
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Over the past several years, the tentacles of luxury fashion have pulled tighter around pro tennis.
Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner, the respective women’s and men’s world number ones, have Gucci deals in common.
Sportico reported this week that there was scuttlebutt over whether these two were allowed by the tournaments to carry Gucci handbags onto court. Sabalenka, conspicuously, was Gucci-less as she took to the court in Paris.
Naomi Osaka, still feeling her way through a return to the top of the women’s game, is the player most apt to treat her on-court arrival like a red carpet premiere.
On Tuesday (May 26), she appeared for her first-round match in a custom gown by “upcycled couture” designer Kevin Germanier. As she walked to the bench, her capacious train swept the court’s clay.
Such flourishes are dispensed with once a match begins. Osaka unzipped down to her stock Nike kit, albeit one in gladiatorial gold with an abundance of sequins.
This is why Joint’s look can be seen as so winsome. She is not, as far as I can tell, sponsored by Oakley. She wears glasses because she needs them.
“I just find it so bright outside – I don’t know how other people can see,” she said this year.
If Joint is an outlier on the court, she has a compatriot in Princess Anne, who for more than a decade has been photographed in a pair of incongruous Adidas wraparound frames.
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Her helmet hairdo, her genteel scarves, her tweedy coats – they could be from 50 years ago.
But those reflective glasses? They’re still something of the future.
They also flirt with bad taste. This is certainly why Demna made sport sunglasses a cornerstone of his thumb-in-the-eye, dystopian melange at Balenciaga.
It’s endearing to see a royal like Princess Anne in glasses similar to what you’d see hanging on the rack at a gas station for US$10 (approximately RM40).
Almost every “tasteful” style of sunglasses on the market these days is a reference of a reference, each Ray-Ban style or new pair of Saint Laurent shades just trading on a design of the past.
But wraparounds are not that. They don’t “go” with anything. They are so anti-fashion that they tip over into fashion. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
