Serena Williams has designed a dress to fit ‘every’ woman’s body type, and she is now urging ladies to embrace and flaunt their individual shape.
The 39-year-old tennis player – who has a sweet looking daughter, Alexis Olympia, with her husband Alexis Ohanian – unveiled her eponymous fashion line last year and famous fans include her long-time friend and British royal Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
And now Serena, who has come under plenty of public scrutiny for her fashion choices both on and off the court over the years, is attempting to shake up the industry by unveiling a $120 dress that she says will fit and flatter every different body type, revealing in a video posted to her Instagram account exactly why she wanted to design such a garment.
‘We’re having a red hot summer over @serena,’ the tennis player wrote alongside a video ad for the new design, which sees her modeling the bold red number alongside six other women.
‘I designed the Twist Front Dress for everybody and every BODY.’
In the clip, the athlete goes on to share that she wanted to create a design that would allow women of all body types to proudly show off their shape and their personalities no matter what size they are.
‘No one in the world looks exactly the same,’ she says. ‘We all are different people, we have different personalities, we have different traits.
‘We all look different and we’ve got to bring our personalities out!’
Speaking to her video co-stars – women of all different shapes and sizes – Serena gets them to describe how the dress makes them feel.
‘With this dress, I feel curvy, it gives me cleavage,’ a woman called Diondria says, while Val chimes in: ‘I feel spicy like a jalapeno.’
‘You know I’m curvy, but I’m confident in my curves,’ Isha then adds. ‘You have really taken something and made it work for different sizes.
‘It makes everyone feel like they’re embraced.’
Serena then concludes the video by saying: ‘I love it… What better way to showcase it than on every body type?’
The clip certainly seems to have hit home with her followers, racking up close to 2.1million views and more than 2,500 comments in just two days.
‘I love your message and the dress,’ one person wrote alongside the clip, while another added: ‘This is awesome!’
The dress itself has also incredibly popular, with the majority of sizes in the red version selling out in just a matter of days; for those who are still eager to lay their hands on it however, never fear, because there are still plenty of options left in the black version.
Serena’s new dress launch comes just a few weeks after the sporting super star hinted that she will move into fashion full-time when she retired from tennis.
Speaking to Sports Illustrated while covering the magazine’s Fashionable 50 issue, Serena explained: ‘For me, it’s important to have something beyond tennis because I have always planned on it.
‘My dad was like, You can’t just play tennis forever, even though I kind of have.
‘But at some point I’m gonna have to stop and I’ve always wanted to have a back-up plan in case tennis didn’t work out.’
She added of inspiration behind her brand: ‘I knew one day I wanted to create this brand that would be for people that have different aspirations and want to be fierce at the same time.’
The seven-time Wimbledon champion has previously admitted she has ‘always loved fashion’ since was a child and she can always remember how her mother Oracene Price would make her own clothes from patterns she found in Vogue magazine.
Designer: In the clip, several of the other women featured discuss how the $120 Twist Front Dress makes them feel, with Diondria (left) praising how it emphasizes her curves
She shared: ‘I’ve always loved fashion. I remember when I was a kid, my mom used to make all our outfits.
‘Back then, they had Vogue patterns. I would always see her pinning them and making all our clothes. And she taught us how to sew early on. So, I used to sew clothes for my dolls out of old socks and I would cut them up and make little outfits out of them.’
Serena studied fashion at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Florida from 2000 to 2003 and her training has proved to be useful as a professional tennis player.
She recalled: ‘I remember one time playing a tournament and, after I won, I put on a skirt to take a picture and my skirt broke. Everyone in the locker room was like, “Oh, the seamstress left.” And I’m like, “Well, did she leave her stuff?” And they were like, “Yeah.”
‘So I said, “I’ll get it.” Yeah, it was just a simple stitch, you know, I could have hand-sewn it too,’ she added gamely. ‘And everyone’s jaws were on the floor!’
