{"id":17480,"date":"2026-05-05T16:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T16:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/17480\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T16:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T16:14:08","slug":"exclusive-blood-bodily-transformation-and-659000-stitches-naomi-osaka-explains-her-daring-met-gala-2026-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/17480\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Blood, Bodily Transformation, and 659,000 Stitches: Naomi Osaka Explains Her Daring Met Gala 2026 Look"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Met\u2019s press conference Monday morning<\/a>, which christened the opening of the Costume Institute\u2019s 2026 exhibition \u201cCostume Art,\u201d Met Gala co-chair<\/a> Venus Williams, another tennis great, addressed the crowd. In her speech, she said fashion \u201callowed me to connect to myself\u201d more than anything else\u2014than to fans, than to brands, than to the pop culture conversation. I asked Osaka if she felt similarly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think for me, obviously, I appreciate that people like the fashion,\u201d said Osaka. \u201cI would say, yeah, I primarily do it as a way to express myself. I think, you know, growing up, I lived in New York and Florida for my younger years, and then I went to Japan one year and it kind of blew me away how people were able to express themselves so well, and I always took that with me. I realized early that on the tennis court, you know, we\u2019re kind of limited. So I would say the fashion is really just to have fun and spice it up a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

That may be true, but Osaka does take fashion\u2014and its peripheral industries\u2014more seriously than most in her profession. She\u2019s studied in it, and cites Yoon Ahn, of the label Ambush, as someone whose style she reveres, along with the aesthetics cultivated by Rihanna and Solange Knowles. She collaborated with Takashi Murakami, the artist (a man himself with multiple fashion crossovers) on a Yonex tennis racket a few years ago; Osaka knows what she\u2019s talking about when it comes to creative fields. Her demonstration of it, though, hasn\u2019t come without flack; her Australian Open outfit, and to a degree her look at the BNP Paribas Open a few weeks later (which featured facial piercings and ear clips designed by Chris Habana), drew ire from armchair Instagram and X commentators. The chorus cried that Osaka should focus on her court game, not her closet\u2019s, in large part because she hasn\u2019t yet found her rhythm in full since returning to tennis in 2024 after a 17-month hiatus after giving birth to her daughter, Shai.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Naomi OsakaArturo Holmes\/MG26\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the Met\u2019s press conference Monday morning, which christened the opening of the Costume Institute\u2019s 2026 exhibition \u201cCostume…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1908,8,13564,13592,85,1050,2497,1257],"class_list":{"0":"post-17480","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-osaka","8":"tag-fashion","9":"tag-japan","10":"tag-met-gala","11":"tag-met-gala-2026","12":"tag-osaka","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-style","15":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}