With two consecutive Grand Slam titles and a world number-one-ranking, the soft-spoken 21-year-old Naomi Osaka is making a furious noise with her racket.
ON A WARM SATURDAY evening in Boca Raton, Naomi Osaka sits back in her chair on the deck of a fish restaurant and gently sparkles. She’s wearing a glittering silver sweatshirt with long gray ribbons dangling from the sleeves, bought at a boutique in Tokyo. Osaka was born in Japan and represents the country as a tennis player, but she lives here in Florida, and her sense of style lands somewhere between the two places—“a bit too wild for America, but too tame for Japan,” as she describes it before noting that in Tokyo, women often seem dressed for a movie premiere. “I find that really cool,” Osaka says. She’s drawn to Japanese designers, like Comme des Garçons, with edgy, sculptural sensibilities. Tonight, though, she’s adapted to local customs and wears clean white sneakers and faded jeans, with a pair of gold-rimmed aviator-style glasses from Coach resting on her nose.
When she is not hitting a tennis ball—something she does, these days, better than anyone in the world— Osaka would, perhaps, rather her clothes do the talking for her. “I prefer to listen,” she says softly. Upon winning her first significant title, at Indian Wells in 2018, she told the crowd that she would give “the worst acceptance speech of all time.” When she won the 2019 Australian Open, not long after our dinner, she began her victory speech, “Um, hello, sorry, public speaking isn’t really my strong side.”
This story is from the April 2019 edition of Vogue.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of Vogue.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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