‘Challengers’ turns the heat on tenniscore
Even before its showing, Challengers, the new film of Luca Guadagnino, was already going viral for its titillating trailer of a ménage-à-trois of professional tennis players played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. Summoning the two handsome WASPS from the floor to sit by her side, the African-American Queen Bee sat on a bed that served as her throne to receive them, offering her neck to feast on. The scene was enough to drum up interest in the centuries-old sport, inspiring designers and influencers to give their spins on tenniscore.
It helps that the Italian director chose Jonathan Anderson, the creative mastermind behind the influential labels Loewe and JW Anderson, as costume designer. Guadagnino, renowned for his visually stunning films like Suspiria and Call Me By Your Name, has a track record of collaborating with esteemed designers. Raf Simons worked on I Am Love and A Bigger Splash, which was acclaimed for its remarkable costumes, and Valentino did The Staggering Girl.
Anderson has an illustrious career, characterized by an unorthodox, cerebral approach and ability to push creative boundaries. Together with Guadagnino, it’s a merging of two high-style, high-concept creative powerhouses.
“We liked that people would have no sense that this would be costume design,” Anderson said in an interview on wmagazine.com. “It’s just everyday wear and it’s set in the world of competitive tennis.”
Inasmuch as he has always subverted “normcore,” reimagining traditional preppy with exaggerated proportions and cheeky references like OnlyFans nudes in his fall 2024 collection, in this film, his take on normal clothes is more subtle, adding sexiness and tension to reflect the characters and their dynamics. The more quotidian it is, the more meaning you can add to uncover and the better to serve the narrative.
In the film, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) is a tennis player turned coach who has transformed her husband, Art Donaldson (Faist) from a mediocre player into a world-famous champion. He has turned complacent, however, prompting her to jolt him out of his losing streak by making him play a challenger event, a lower tournament level on the pro tour. This brings him face to face, however, with the once-promising, now down-on-his-luck Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), his ex-best friend and his wife’s ex-boyfriend.
Starting as a bright young prodigy when she first meets the two, Tashi’s wardrobe brings out her star powers, with a spotless white Adidas tennis dress on the court that sets off her glowing brown skin and a jacquard blue, strapless evening dress in the evening to celebrate her victory. The boys are in preppy striped button-downs and pastel polos, khakis and Ts of carefree boyishness that ooze Abercrombie-esque sexuality.
When she visits them in their hotel room, she has the two eating out of the palm of her hand, wearing micro shorts and a pink Juicy Couture zip-up hoodie in velour—the 2000s hot-girl branded staple that verged on the gaudy. It’s the perfect outfit when she toys with them in their hotel room, initiating a three-way tease, only to lean back as the two end up kissing each other. It’s a preview of things to come, how she coaches them erotically, romantically and professionally.
Thirteen years later, the clothes evolve, as the characters do. As Tashi finds confidence as a coach following a career-ending injury, she trades her preppy tennis skirts for cashmere and tailored looks of quiet luxury while Art has a similar curated look worthy of his wife’s approval, as opposed to his former mismatched separates. “Tashi is proof that there is something about success that ultimately makes people go toward conformity,” says Anderson. “You get to this point where everyone else who is successful has the same luggage or the same jewelry, all aspiring to this same thing, which becomes slightly generic. Art, her husband, is a vessel for whatever you want him to be. So, if he’s going to be Adidas, he’s Adidas; if it’s Uniqlo, he’s Uniqlo. There is no aesthetic—it is just whatever is there.”
Anderson was obsessed with how Americans buy the brand: “There are so many undercurrents in the business of being a tennis player. I liked that it’s a story of how you become successful through branding.”
In contrast to the couple’s carefully crafted exterior and wealth signifiers, Patrick is the anti-establishment poster boy in his mismatched athleisure of plaid shorts and Impatto muscle tee, with a Peter Pan “I won’t grow up” attitude, playing tennis for the love of it as he drives a rundown car and hustles for a hotel room to spend the night, even if he comes from money.
“He’s about portraying wealth. There is a cockiness to him, this way of putting clothing together that becomes quite seductive, because he’s so used to taste that even if it’s put together badly, it somehow looks good,” Anderson explains.
A key outfit in the film is the “I Told Ya” T-shirt that Patrick and Tashi shared when they were in a relationship, a nod to the one worn in 1990s paparazzi photos by John F. Kennedy, Jr., who inspired Patrick’s character. Towards the end when tensions build up, Tashi breaks her carefully curated image, trading her signature silk gown for a T-shirt reminiscent of her junior-pro days to meet Patrick in a culminating watershed point in the film.
If tenniscore merges with normcore in the film, the promotional tour brings it to more red-carpet levels with the help of Zendaya’s stylist, Law Roach, and Anderson creating bespoke looks that have certainly turned the heat up on tennis fashion as well as on the film itself, which is already in the cultural conversation and promises to be a hit at the box office.