Hi everyone, welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture. ICYMI: I’m now working on SportsVerse full-time! Follow along on IG.
Last night, I attended an event hosted by Jessica Schiffer and Hard Court, her newsletter that has quickly become the authority on the converging worlds of tennis and fashion.
The atmosphere in New York right now for those interested in tennis could only be described as the kind that surrounds fashion week (only far more enjoyable). The excitable energy shared by folks knowing that they could — if they wanted to — attend at least 20 different parties over the coming week, and see the same combination of attendees at pretty much every single one of them, enjoying free drinks, taking ’fit pics, and talking about things they love (in this case, tennis and fashion).
The party, which took place at the Phillip Lim store in Manhattan, had the benefit of that rampant pre-fashion week/US Open energy. The store was packed full of interesting people whose work contributes to this growing intersection. For example, Ayan Bromfield, former NCAA champion tennis player, influencer, and partner to Frances Tiafoe, was in attendance, along with several other big names from the tennis-adjacent worlds.
What stood out to me, however, was how many fashion-lifestyle-sports writers were present at the party, and how visible they and their platforms had become even in the year since the last US Open took place. I attended the event with my good friend and regular tennis enemy Mel Kenny, who writes the brilliant “Hard Hitting” newsletter (and is genuinely one of the hardest hitters I’ve ever come up against). I met Lee Glandorf, writer of The Sweat Lookbook, for the first time in person, after appreciating her work online for a long while. My guy Mike Sykes, who used to write The Kicks You Wear newsletter on Substack before taking over my former sports beat at The Business of Fashion, also pulled up. Another journalist I met in person for the first time was Evan Cole, one of the brilliant young minds behind Racquet Theory, an independent tennis-culture media outlet with a growing newsletter on Substack.
In conversations with them all at various points of the night, it struck me that fashion writers had become the new VIPs of the US Open. This is arguably true across various sports right now, but it applies especially to tennis, and especially to the US Open.
