Inside Serena Williams’s Intimate New York Fashion Week Show

If there’s one thing New York Fashion Week is known for, it’s a spectacle on the runway. So, when it came time for Serena Williams to debut her latest S by Serena collection, she knew she needed to think outside the box. “I wanted to do something totally different,” says Williams. “This show is not your normal fashion show; it’s really intimate.” Presented as a fireside chat with Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, the FOCUS produced event offered a glimpse inside both Williams’s creative process and her distinctive vision for fall 2020. Elegant, accessible, and with an eye toward sustainability—partly thanks to a capsule focused on vegan leather—the clothes reflected Williams’s ongoing evolution as a designer.

Though she’s best known as one of the sporting world’s all-time greats, Williams’s love affair with fashion began at a young age. “My mom used to make our outfits when we would play tennis,” she says. “She taught me early on how to sew and how to make things—it’s always been something that inevitably I was going to be in.” Williams’s status as an elite athlete, however, ended up making the journey to New York Fashion Week a little more complicated. “In between winning Wimbledon and [the] U.S. Open, I was in fashion school,” she explains. “Every day someone would have a meltdown—it was hard, between patternmaking and learning how to work those industrial sewing machines. That alone will make you cry!”

A decade later, and just moments before her collection’s debut, Williams is calm and collected. Standing backstage with her best friend, Caroline Wozniacki (who incidentally made her modeling debut during the show), she’s ready to take the audience into her world and share her mission statement. “We want women to feel celebrated and appreciated. It doesn’t matter what you look like, where you come from, or what size you are,” Williams says. “You might have a bad day, but you put on our clothes, and you feel confident.”