We left her in tears after her elimination in the third round of the US Open.
She had just announced that we would probably never see her again on the tennis courts.
Ten days later, we find her, a smile on her face, escorted by four bullet collectors.
The tennis champion demonstrated the bridge she has been building for years between sport and fashion by parading on Tuesday September 13 in the streets of New York, on the occasion of the Vogue World show organized during Fashion Week.
"I knew I had two loves (tennis and fashion), and that I had to find a way to reconcile the two," Serena Williams posted in 2018 on her Instagram account.
The tennis player has often shown that clothing is intrinsic to her professional career.
Like during her last tournament, at the end of August, where she wore a little black dress from her sponsor Nike, with long transparent sleeves, and a six-ply petticoat - symbolically, to remember each title she won at the US Open .
On Tuesday, “The Queen of Queens,” as she was billed for her debut in what was her final US Open, appeared in a silver cape and custom-designed Balenciaga dress.
With a first for her: the opening of a fashion show.
As the player walked the podium,
a recording of his voice taken from an interview given to NBC in 2000 accompanied his footsteps in the background.
"I want people to remember me as the girl who changed tennis or was just able to bring something new to the game."
Full screen
Serena Williams at fashion week.
'New York, September 12, 2022.) Getty Images
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Shaping a new image
At the dawn of her 41st birthday (she will celebrate them on September 26), Serena Williams is rocking into a new life.
Clothing, here, helps shape this new image.
Which is nothing new for Serena Williams, who has always used self-presentation as a weapon of change.
Carefully thought out, her outfits have broken old tennis dress codes.
From the white required at Wimbledon to the tight suits banned from Roland-Garros, the player has freed herself from injunctions throughout her career.
It was then a question of defining new rules of the game by widening the fields of possibilities, even if it meant wiping out mocking, even sexist remarks.
But always with the same determination of who should decide.
For her last dance, in New York, Serena Williams offered a final demonstration by wearing a pair of black Nike shoes with laces topped with small jewels of her own brand, where the words “
queen
” and “
mama
” appeared.
It's hard not to see an echo of the declarations of the champion in the September edition of
Vogue US
, which had specified that she was moving away from the courts because she wanted to expand her family.