This originally appeared in Show Notes, GQ staffer Samuel Hine's fashion week newsletter. For more stories like it, hit the link above and subscribe.
Moving through life as a seven-foot-tall man comes with plenty of quotidian inconveniences. Reilly Opelka, the 25-year-old American tennis player who towers over his peers on the pro tour, lists them off: hitting his head on door frames, squirming around in even the cushiest business class airplane seats. Attending his first Paris Fashion Week, as Opelka is doing this season, has created at least one new challenge for the Brobdingnagian of tennis. When brands offer to dress him for their runway shows, nothing fits. “This was the only thing they sent that worked,” he tells me outside of the Sacai show on Monday morning. Opelka is wearing a light green Sacai parka, as big as they come, the sleeves barely grazing the top of the gold Rolex Daytona on his wrist. “Another jacket, the sleeves were up here,” he says, gesturing at the middle of his cannon-like forearm.
Opelka’s height, of course, offers plenty of professional advantages. With a formidable 140-mph serve that hurtles toward opponents like a meteor crashing to earth, Opelka has grown into a top-tier tennis player and a perpetual tournament threat, one of several men who are leading American tennis into the post-Federer era. And it makes him hard to miss. As we walk into the venue, street style photographers rush toward Opelka, cameras held high over their heads, to take his photo.
In recent years, brands like Miu Miu, Thom Browne, Palace, and Aimé Leon Dore have reworked the history of tennis style in their collections. But Opelka is the rare player to pursue an interest in fashion. He lifts weights in Rick Owens, and swaps texts with designers like Kris Van Assche, whom he met in Antwerp, the ancestral home of avant-garde garments. “I’m in Antwerp all the time,” he says. He’s sponsored by an art gallery there—one of the only pro athletes, to my knowledge, with such an arrangement.
And this season, he’s the only tennis pro in Paris. Due to the tennis circuit’s grueling schedule, where athletes can spend nearly a month preparing for and playing in major tournaments, tennis stars are seldom seen at any of the main fashion weeks. Opelka is currently recovering from hip surgery; if he was healthy, he’d be playing in Tokyo right now. But if you ask him, sitting front row at fashion shows beats chasing down forehands. “This has been one of the best weeks of the year for me,” he says as the Sacai show gets underway. His legs folded in tight to his seat to avoid tripping up any of the models, Opelka takes in the pleated dresses laden with utility pockets as they pass by. He likes what he sees, leaning over to ask me if Sacai creative director Chitose Abe has a shot at the open Louis Vuitton menswear job. Opelka, clearly, knows his stuff.
After exiting through a crowd of craned necks, Opelka origamis his frame into a waiting car to head to a nearby hotel, where he’ll change into a look for Thom Browne. There’s something funny, I note, about a guy with un-dressable proportions being obsessed with clothes. Which leads Opelka to explain the highlight of his week: attending the Rick Owens show and meeting his ultimate fashion idol. “It was incredible,” he says. Opelka considers Owens to be an icon of independent artistry. But his initial interest was purely practical. At 16, in New York for his first US Open, Opelka poked his head into Rick’s SoHo shop, and discovered trousers with legs that drip toward the floor and tees that hang at crotch level. On most people, Rick Owens proportions are intentionally distorted and exaggerated for maximum visual intensity. On Opelka, they look basically normal. “It was the first time in my life I had clothes that actually fit,” he recalls.
These days, he wears Rick Owens head-to-toe practically every day, from the moment he hits the practice court in the morning to evenings palling around in Miami with buddies like US Open semi-finalist Frances Tiafoe. One might guess that wearing dark fashion daily might shape your worldview, and you’d be right. It’s his dream, Opelka says, to wear a full Rick Owens look on center court at Wimbledon. “I’ve come to hate tradition,” Opelka says as we inch our way through Paris traffic. “And obviously tennis is all tradition. Look at Wimbledon—that’s what it is. And it’s not for me. The more I’ve gotten into fashion and art, the more I’ve come to despise some things about tennis.”
Now, Opelka is one of the game’s most prominent contrarians. He doesn’t have a reputation for having a hot head on court like Novak Djokovic or Nick Kygrios, but he’s not afraid to call out tennis writers for hack-y takes, or criticize the ATP for rules he thinks are dumb and outdated.
Like the tote bag rule. At last year’s US Open, Opelka was fined $10,000 for bringing an “unapproved bag” on court with him. It’s a problem only Opelka might face. Where all of his opponents use bags made by ‘“approved” athletic brands, Opelka prefers one he got from his sponsor in Antwerp, Tim van Laere Gallery. Van Laere, it turns out, makes a cool tote, in a Pepto pink shade, emblazoned with the phrase “Art x Tennis Club.” But since a contemporary art gallery isn’t technically a gear manufacturer, per the rules, Opelka was supposed to leave the bag in his locker. But as any fashion fan knows, rules are there to be broken. Van Leare gave him a painting for his troubles.
His obsession with art developed naturally, Opelka explains, the deeper he got into the worlds of Rick, Prada, Loewe, and Ann Demeulemeester. In the car, he pulls out his phone to show me some of the art he’s acquired for his budding collection. He’s got a work by Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde, and another by the controversial German painter and performance artist Jonathan Meese. “When I first got into art, I hated [Meese],” Opelka says. “I was like, ‘I don’t get him, he’s nuts.’ Then I watched his performances and I watched how he spoke, and I got hooked on him. He preaches that art needs to dictate the world—a dictatorship of art.” Now, thanks to his sponsor, Opelka isn’t just playing for money—he’s playing for sick art, too: per their deal, if Opelka wins a grand slam, van Laere will reward him with a painting by an artist on the gallery's roster.
At the hotel, Opelka ducks into a bathroom to get into his custom Thom Browne look. Browne is known for shrunken proportions, but the brand’s work with NBA players like LeBron James has paid dividends for enormous athletes of all kinds. When Opelka emerges, he’s wearing a black cardigan over white shirt and tie, cropped two-tone tweed trousers, and a pair of brogues Thom Browne had left over from when the brand dressed the Cleveland Cavaliers during their 2018 playoff run.
As we make our way to the beaux arts Paris Opera house for the show, Opelka says he’s considered wearing Thom Browne on court in the past. “Thom is great, and it would make sense, because he’s inspired by classic tennis style: Arthur Ashe, guys like that,” he says. The sameness he sees elsewhere in the draw pains him. “The kits themselves, they’re all the same colors, they’re all so similar. Every brand does their photoshoots at Indian Wells, so the vibe is the exact same. There’s nothing unique about it anymore, and it’s sad,” he says. Why, I ask, does he think tennis players haven’t yet taken a page out of the NBA playbook, and turned their tunnel walks into mini fashion shows? “We’re a solo sport,” Opelka replies. “Anything goes wrong with us, there’s a direct effect. So I think the way the business structure of tennis is set up breeds a sort of conservative culture, where everyone’s so scared to be different.”
With a business structure designed around playing for art and wearing big fits on court, though, Opelka can be as different as he wants. Later, I find him on a terrace outside the opera house enjoying a post-show glass of champagne. He’s fielding selfie requests from a few fans, gingerly bending down to get his head in the frame. The show, a lengthy and dramatic procession of opera coats and intricately layered suiting, he says, was “gorgeous.” He met Browne after and is clearly still geeking from the experience, his eyes a little wide and his broad smile plastered to his face. But he’s still an elite athlete, and he’s gotta take care of his recovering body. As he makes his way to the exit, a slight hitch in his broad stride, he says he’s decided to take the rest of the day off. “These fashion week seats,” he says, “aren’t built for seven footers.”
