When Marta Kostyuk walked out onto Wimbledon grass for her opening-round match against Rebecca Šramková a few moments ago, she did so wearing the Wilson tennis dress that seems destined to set the hearts of the tournament’s style-watchers aflutter. What’s immediately apparent is that Kostyuk’s sleeveless, deep-V-neck, largely open-backed dress—in, of course, Wimbledon white—is a picture of grace and elegance. Maybe less obvious? It’s also one of the most technical tennis dresses ever made—and it’s almost an exact copy of her wedding dress.
The whole idea, looking back on it now, was a bit nuts: Last November, Kostyuk, 22—currently 18th in the world, and the 18th seed at Wimbledon—married her fiancé and fellow Ukrainian, George Kyzymenko, 27, in Cyprus. “I’ve known him since I was four,” Kostyuk tells me over drinks at a café in Paris’s 18th a few days before the French Open. “We were practicing at the same tennis club in Kiev when we were kids, but eventually he went to the US to study, and I started playing professionally. We weren’t really in contact, but when I went back to Ukraine in 2022 he called me for a date, and, yeah—that was it. Five months later, he proposed. We just woke up together, and he was like, ‘Let’s go watch the sunrise.’ It was very weird, because usually he likes to sleep in, but I had just come back from the US and was so jetlagged I was barely sleeping, so I was like, ‘Okay—let’s go.’ It was really beautiful—we went to this place in Kiev where you can really see the whole city, and I was recording something on video, and as I turned around, he was there on his knee.”
As Kostyuk tells it, the dress simply involved a great meeting of the minds. “We were just talking about the wedding, and the dress—all of us: my agent and my team and some friends and some people from Wilson—and we were like, ‘Why not be the first brand in tennis to make a wedding dress?’ I was close with Joelle [Joelle Michaeloff, Wilson’s head of design], and we had worked a lot on match clothes and practice stuff and everything—we had this connection—so we thought, Why not create something out of it?”
Michaeloff’s perspective is slightly different. “I was like, ‘Of course—when’s the wedding?’ This was, I think, in August. And she was like, ‘November.’ It was definitely one of those What-did-I-sign-up-for-but-I’m-going-to-figure-this-out moments.”
Complicating matters a bit further: “I think a lot of girls know exactly how they want their wedding dress to look,” Kostyuk says, “but I had no idea what I wanted, or what I liked. I wanted something very simple, but at the same time something that you will remember. I just knew that I didn’t want the kind of wedding dress that weighs 200 kilos, or anything that’s either so complicated or so fragile that you can’t move and you can’t enjoy being around people. So we just started slowly, from nothing, and just starting shaping it little by little: What do you think about this? About that?”
I ask Michaeloff if she felt—you know, nervous. Anxious. Panicked, even. “I felt extremely confident about actually doing it—I’ve worked across pretty much any category you could imagine in the fashion and active space,” she says. “What made for some sleepless nights was both the timeline and her schedule. How was I going to get her fitted between the matches and wherever she’d be in the world?
“I did have a moment where I reached out to her agent and was like, ‘I’m not a wedding dress designer. Marta knows that she can go out and buy something for her wedding basically anywhere, yes? What I’m going to give her isn’t going to be like that.’ And she said, ‘Absolutely—that’s why she wants you to do it.’”
With that kind of trust already established, player and designer got to work. “I told Joelle that I trusted her,” Kostuk says, “and then she developed the idea, sent me some sketches.”
“We just got on a Teams call and started to talk. My number one thing is, What’s your favorite part of your body? What’s the part that you feel the most confident in? But also: What do you want to hide?” Michaeloff says. “I already knew quite a bit about Marta—she’s quite strong and built in certain parts of her body, and sometimes that makes her feel less feminine, so she likes to highlight her feminine side. We started there, and then we went into, like, okay: When you think about neckline, and coverage, and length… we just went through all these questions, and I would pull images—I had a whole folder of references, and I just kept getting feedback.”
Michaeloff met up with Kostyuk at the US Open in September in New York, taking her measurements outside, in the players’ private garden, and the project was off and running. Soon came more calls, more sketches, more ideas.
“I came up with 12 different options,” Michaeloff says, “just quick pencil sketches and ideas around different necklines, different skirt types, different strap types, different materials. Eventually we made a dress by combining sketches of three different dresses, and then I just took it from there. Marta blindly trusted me, which made me a little nervous—but, I think, tells you a lot about our relationship and how we work together.”
By September, the first sample was ready. Kostyuk tried it on in China, where she was playing. “That’s where we came up with the idea for two dresses,” Kostyuk says. “The initial plan was for one longish dress, kind of plain, but while we were doing the fittings, we decided that it would be cool to have two dresses: one just for the ceremony and another one for the after-party, for the dinner—something more easy, more comfortable. So we agreed that the overdress for the ceremony would be long and covered in flowers, but still a little see-through, and the second dress was the same underdress, but with a plain, short, sheer white overdress.”
The result was an overdress of silk organza with hand-appliquéd flowers that start more dense and then cascade into nothing as you move down the hem. The dress itself goes on like a jacket and buttons up the front. “I wanted it to be easy and really functional,” Michaeloff says. “The under-bodice, though, is really what makes this one of the most technical wedding dresses ever made. It has a built-in shelf prop, much like our tennis dresses,” Michaeloff explains, “so everything’s built-in and she could jump in the ocean in this dress if she wanted to. The fabric is this gorgeous, highly technical Italian fabric with just a slight shimmer, to that it really hugged and fit her like something she could go and play a match in.”
All of this talk of technical performance has me wondering: Just how much performance does one need in a wedding dress?
“I'm just living a high-performance life in general,” Kostyuk responds. “Everything I wear and everything I buy has to basically serve me, rather than me serve the clothes. It was really important for me to be able to enjoy this day to the fullest, and I live a very active life—I don't really know how to not be active. I just live at a certain pace.”
And did the wedding itself live up to that kind of pace?
“It certainly did,” Kostyuk says. “Let’s just say that the dress survived.” She laughs, but is tight-lipped about any further details. “The dress is fine.”
If making a high-concept wedding dress seems like something of a departure for an activewear designer, well, to Michaeloff, it’s all very much part of her design philosophy, which involves making pieces that are as beautiful as something you would wear your entire day, or into your evening. They just happen to be athleticwear. “It has to be beautiful first—to be tailored, to be crafted,” Michaeloff says. “It’s got all the high-tech, super-performance aspects, of course—they’re just not overt. It’s stealth technology: You can’t see it. In the world we’re living in, there's no reason why you have to scream performance anymore.”
Michaeloff has been pioneering activewear for more than two decades, including a formative early stint with Lululemon. She joined Wilson four years ago to launch their first-ever sportswear line. “There really wasn’t an activewear industry when I started out,” she says. “Athleisure didn’t exist, and it’s something that I’ve been super-passionate about. It really comes from a place of being an athlete and wanting to have things that actually look good, so that you feel like yourself as you’re playing.”
Cut to Martyuk walking out at Wimbledon in the tennis version of her tennis-centric wedding dress. “We kept the mini-overlayer dress, which buttons off,” Michaeloff says. “Her walkout will be with all the layers, and then she’ll remove this over-dress, which is exactly like the wedding dress in that there’s the five buttons down the front; I’ve made her a quick-release option so she can take it off fast. What’s underneath is basically the original dress, but with a built-in ball short in this one.” (As active as Kostyuk says she is, she nonetheless did not ask for a ball short as part of her wedding dress.) “Basically, we added an underlayer component and then raised the neckline a little bit—we don’t want any mistakes in Wimbledon—and we’re selling it at retail: You can either get it as two pieces or just buy the one-piece.”
Even aside from getting married and helping design both her wedding dress and her Wimbledon dress (and starting her own foundation on top of it all), it’s been a whirlwind few years for Kostyuk, as she’s seen her ranking and her tournament success steadily climb while the situation in her native Ukraine becomes ever more complicated and fraught. “Tennis is a game of a lot of puzzles,” she says. “It’s taken me some time to get to where I am, but I’ve put a lot of effort in it. I think some major changes happened when the war started. It was obviously a very big moment in my life—a big crisis, in a way—and I’m really proud of how I’ve managed this difficult time. I think I’ve turned it into an advantage, ultimately, because I had to grow very quickly through it to withstand everything that was going on.”
Kostyuk has garnered a few headlines recently for her policy of refusing the customary post-match handshake when she’s competing against Russian players—something she’s spoken about eloquently, and with great conviction.
“I am extremely proud to be Ukrainian and to represent this country, this culture, and these people,” she says. “They’ve been there for me my whole career, supporting me, since I was a kid, and for me, this is just my values: It’s what I think is right, and I fight for it in a way that I know and in the way that I can. I do what I believe. I don’t harm anyone. Whoever doesn’t like it? Well, sorry—their problem.”
After Wimbledon, of course, the Olympics await—where Kostyuk, as you can imagine, is thrilled and honored to be representing Ukraine for the first time. “This year, of course, it’s more important for me, given the fact that we have a war going on. It’s nice to be there and to represent.”
And while Kostyuk credits much of her recent focus and success to her ongoing work with psychologists, she goes to some pains to note that she’s aiming high. “Even though I live a lot of my life on the court, you cannot work just on the sports side of your head,” she says. “I’ve always been a big believer that you cannot do just one thing: You have to do everything. It might take longer, but the reward is much bigger. I just think that real changes happen when you change as a human being, not when you change as an athlete. It was crucial for me, so it’s very nice to be able to share it and talk about it—because I’m happy.”