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Naomi Osaka’s Eiffel Tower Dress Hands Kevin Germanier a Roland Garros Runway
<p>Four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka walked onto Court Suzanne-Lenglen on Tuesday in a black corset and a long pleated skirt that grazed the clay, then peeled off the outer layer to reveal a gold sequined dress she said reminded her of the Eiffel Tower at dusk. The Roland Garros crowd applauded the unveiling. Osaka then dispatched Germany&#8217;s Laura Siegemund <strong>6-3, 7-6(3)</strong> to open her French Open campaign.</p>
<p>The walk-on piece was the bigger fashion story, and most of the headlines skipped past it. The corset and skirt came from Kevin Germanier, the Swiss-born couturier who has spent six years turning landfill-bound sequins and discarded fabric into red-carpet gowns. Tennis just handed his Paris label a stage most luxury brands cannot buy.</p>
<h2>The Walk-On at Court Suzanne-Lenglen</h2>
<p>The two-part outfit was choreographed for the broadcast moment. Osaka&#8217;s pre-match corset, hand-finished in black with a fitted bodice, sat over a pleated cascading skirt that opened at the front so she could walk without it catching on the surface. Underneath was the Nike-designed dress that drew the gasps.</p>
<p>The gold tennis dress is striped with horizontal bands of sequins that catch direct sunlight. Court Suzanne-Lenglen, the second-largest show court at Roland Garros, faces west and holds the late-afternoon glare. The dress was made to be seen there.</p>
<p>&#8220;Honestly, it&#8217;s very couture,&#8221; Osaka told the on-court interviewer after the win. She added the Eiffel Tower comparison without prompting: &#8220;You know the Eiffel Tower at night when it&#8217;s like sparkly? I kind of think I look like that a little bit.&#8221;</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter featured-image" style="margin:1.5em auto;text-align:center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="https://budgyapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/naomi-osaka-french-open-gold-sequined-eiffel-tower-dress-at-roland-garros.webp" alt="Naomi Osaka French Open gold sequined Eiffel Tower dress at Roland Garros." style="width:100%;max-width:800px;height:auto;border-radius:8px;display:block;margin:0 auto;" /><figcaption style="text-align:center;font-size:0.85em;color:#888;margin-top:0.5em;">Naomi Osaka French Open gold sequined Eiffel Tower dress at Roland Garros.</figcaption></figure>
<h2>The Swiss Designer Behind the Black Corset</h2>
<h3>From Geneva Art School to Central Saint Martins</h3>
<p>Germanier grew up in a small village near Sion in the Swiss canton of Valais before enrolling at the Geneva School of Art and Design, then applying to London&#8217;s Central Saint Martins. He was accepted after seven rounds of interviews. Broke as a student and unable to afford new fabric, he started building his collections out of duvet covers, bed sheets, and scraps pulled from skips. The constraint became the brand. In 2018, while moonlighting from a junior leather-goods role at Louis Vuitton, he launched his eponymous label from his Paris apartment, sketching from 9:30 p.m. until 2 a.m. after his day job.</p>
<h3>Lady Gaga, Bjork, and the Olympics Stage</h3>
<p>Within four years he had dressed Lady Gaga, the Icelandic singer Bjork, and the K-pop artist Sunmi. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in 2020 and reached the LVMH Prize semi-final the year before. The career-changing assignment arrived in summer 2024, when the Paris organising committee picked Germanier for <a href="https://wwd.com/fashion-news/designer-luxury/paris-2024-olympics-closing-ceremony-costumes-germanier-1236488036/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Paris 2024 Olympics closing-ceremony costume program</a>, where he designed more than 120 looks for the dancers. The headline garment, the so-called Golden Voyager jumpsuit, was embellished with <strong>20,000 sequins and pearls</strong> diverted from landfill in Hong Kong. He also raided his mother&#8217;s basement for 167 old VHS tapes that he shredded into fabric.</p>
<h3>A Label Built on Discarded Materials</h3>
<p>Germanier sources beads and sequins from a single recycling house in Hong Kong, where he first saw warehouses of fabric waste during a student stint with Shanghai Tang. He has told Business of Fashion he wants his work to read as &#8220;fast couture,&#8221; finished in weeks rather than months. The Tuesday corset for Osaka followed the rule he applies to every commission: every visible material on the piece had a prior life before it reached his Paris studio. The Roland Garros walk-on, in other words, was an upcycled garment.</p>
<h2>Tunnel-Walk Fashion Comes to Tennis</h2>
<p>Pre-game tunnel fashion is a settled habit in American basketball and football. The NBA (National Basketball Association) built a multimillion-dollar attention engine around the player walk from parking garage to locker room, and the NFL (National Football League, the dominant US pro-football league) followed. Tennis has resisted the format because players do not have a tunnel, and the walk from the chair umpire to the baseline is short.</p>
<p>Osaka and the Williams sisters have together pushed the sport past that resistance. Serena Williams used the 2018 French Open to debut a black Nike catsuit that referenced post-natal blood-clot compression and was <strong>banned the following year</strong> by then-French Tennis Federation president Bernard Giudicelli. Osaka is now treating the chair walk like a runway entrance, and she is bringing a non-tennis designer with her each time.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Year</th>
<th>Player</th>
<th>Outfit moment</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>2010</td>
<td>Venus Williams</td>
<td>Black lace dress with red trim from her own Eleven label at Roland Garros</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2018</td>
<td>Serena Williams</td>
<td>Black Nike catsuit at Roland Garros, banned the following year by the FFT</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2024</td>
<td>Naomi Osaka</td>
<td>Sakura-pink Nike kit at the US Open</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2026</td>
<td>Naomi Osaka</td>
<td>Gold Nike sequined dress with a Germanier walk-on at Roland Garros</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Each of those moments forced a conversation tennis tends to avoid: what players are allowed to wear, who profits from the broadcast frame, and which designers get the most-watched four minutes on a show court.</p>
<h2>The Gold Nike Dress, Built to Glow</h2>
<p>Nike designed the playing dress separately from the Germanier corset, although the two pieces were styled to read as one continuous look. The dress is a fitted scoop-neck tennis cut with horizontal sequin bands sewn over a stretch base. Sequin density is heaviest at the bodice and lightens toward the hem so the player can move without snagging the fabric on her racket arm.</p>
<p>Osaka clarified after her match that the dress was a tournament-specific Nike piece, not a wider deal renewal. She has worked with several designers since parting from her previous apparel arrangement, including Yoon Ahn for Adidas earlier in her career and Robert Wun for her 2026 Australian Open kit. Germanier and Nike now join that rotating list.</p>
<p>The garment did create one practical problem on court. &#8220;I actually got a little worried because when the sun hits the dress, it reflects a lot,&#8221; she said in her press conference, according to the Associated Press. &#8220;So I was a little scared that the umpire was going to kick me off the court.&#8221; She brought two plain backup dresses to the locker room in case the chair official ruled the sequins were causing glare for Siegemund.</p>
<h2>Praise from Sabalenka, a Shrug from Siegemund</h2>
<p>World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka watched the broadcast and offered the loudest endorsement. The Belarusian top seed told TNT Sports she welcomed the spectacle.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I love it. I love that she&#8217;s expressing herself. She feels confident, and that&#8217;s the beauty of the fashion world. There&#8217;s space for anything, and I love that she&#8217;s bringing it on court.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That was Sabalenka speaking to the broadcaster on Tuesday afternoon, hours before her own first-round outing.</p>
<p>Siegemund, the German veteran who lost the match in straight sets, was not interested in the wardrobe discussion. &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t care less,&#8221; she told TNT Sports. &#8220;I come here to play tennis, not to put on a fashion show. And if others want to put on a fashion show, then they should go ahead and do it. That&#8217;s totally fine with me.&#8221; The split is itself the story tennis has been postponing. A growing portion of the women&#8217;s tour now treats the chair-walk as a broadcast set piece, and Siegemund&#8217;s complaint already sounds like a holdout view.</p>
<h2>Vekic Awaits in Round Two</h2>
<p>The fashion noise will fade by Thursday. Osaka is ranked <strong>No. 16</strong> on this week&#8217;s WTA singles list, with a year-to-date record of nine wins and five losses since her January return from injury, according to <a href="https://www.wtatennis.com/players/319998/naomi-osaka" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the WTA&#8217;s player-profile page for Naomi Osaka</a>. She has never advanced past the <strong>third round</strong> at Roland Garros across her previous appearances at the tournament, a record she will try again to break this fortnight.</p>
<p>Her second-round opponent is Donna Vekic, the 2024 Olympic singles silver medalist from Croatia. The two will meet on Thursday at Court Suzanne-Lenglen, the same court where the gold dress made its first-round debut. Vekic took silver in Paris twenty months ago, and the head-to-head between the two players is even.</p>
<p>For Germanier, the Tuesday walk-on was worth more than most paid runway slots. Tennis broadcasts looped the look across the evening news cycle, and <a href="https://houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/society/eco-couturier-kevin-germanier" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a designer who built his Paris house on landfill-bound sequins</a> now has the most-watched five seconds of clay-court airtime he has ever scored. Inbound interest from other players&#8217; management teams is the predictable next step.</p>
<p>The gold sequins will be back on Suzanne-Lenglen on Thursday afternoon; whether they last past the second round is the question the fashion noise has been quietly hiding all week.</p>