As The Bracket Thins, The Great And The Good Pile In

By definition, the location-within-a-location of Roland Garros — which stadium we shouldn’t need to recall is very much in Paris — makes everybody look their iconic best, very much including American tennis great Venus Williams and her Italian/Danish husband Andrea Preti. The couple are summery, crisp and cool — black polka dots on a tennis-white ground for her, and grounded earth tones for him — at the Berrettini/Arnaldi match on June 3. That hazy yellow orb flying between the camera and Williams’ gorgeously regal face is a volley rocketing camera left. It is, after all, the French Open.

Note the as-yet unretired tennis champion’s eyes. As decades of the toughest court battles have schooled her, she’s looking in front of the ball — in effect, where the shot is headed, not where it is or was — to afford more nanoseconds toward understanding what sort of havoc it will wreak when it lands. That’s a tennis player watching a tennis match, a pure Zen moment of understanding.

Mathieu Forget — aka, forgetmat — is a balletic French photographer and anti-gravity practitioner whose gift is to retain his ultracalm demeanor while launching himself into various postures of “levitated” suspension for the camera. Pictured above uncharacteristically photographed by another shooter, in this case, WireImage’s Pierre Suu — usually Forget photographs himself — Forget relaxes on an imaginary stool while thumbing through a copy of his recently published book, entitled, aptly, Levitation. The book can be read with an augmented-reality app as available on an iphone. In a word, yes: the French Open can easily be torqued as an ideal advertisement for yourself. Even if it’s a massive coffee-table tome as Monsieur Forget’s is, you must schlepp your wares with you so as to have them handy for the thronging paparazzi. No moss gathering on Monsieur Forget as he does this, by the way. Is he quick? Well, yes, sort of! In the sense that he can get his feet back under him, we hope.

May we posit that iconic French wit and filmmaker Didier Bourdon married above his station? Probably not a good idea. It could cause a lot of trouble to state something like that as a fact because it would question his (in France) unquestionably lofty iconography. And that is beyond any question. Pictured above bracketed by his ultra-stylish wife, Marie Sandra Badini, right, and one of his two equally stylish daughters by her, Clélia Bourdon, Cléa for short, left, Bourdon looks every inch the confident, accomplished filmmaker, off-duty, thus aptly léger in his sneakers and jeans. Much safer just to leave it at that.

But as for males at Roland Garros making a bit of an effort at decorous wear, it’s much safer to say that the durably onrushing Chris Pine, of Star Trek, Jack Ryan, and other notable roles, has nailed it in his cream double-breasted with aircraft-carrier-size lapels on June 1. Paired with a set of tasseled loafers under a straight black trouser, this gear looks ready for any dinner-and-afterparty you’d care to throw at its wearer.

TNT tennis pundit Eugenie Bouchard, pictured above in the press scrum filming tidily on her phone, went for the well-blazered crispy look as well on June 1 — must have been something in the air. But actually, that frock is a frock, or a blazer-frock, or a blazer-cut frock, take your pick. Whatever we choose to call it, it’s working in this press scrum, and we’re sure that whatever she’s about to bruit on camera will be a laser-sharp dispatch.

Naturally, Roland Garros is renowned for drawing the names of the past at this time of year, so, on cue, Russian tennis great Maria Sharapova attends the day 10 matches on June 2. Pictured above, right, Sharapova definitely seems to have gotten the “blazer rules” memo in a sharp dark number with elegant piping. Sharapova gave birth to her and her British fiance Alexander Gilkes’ son Theodore in 2022. Last September, she sold her $25 million mansion in Manhattan Beach, California, to the Lakers’ Slovenian star Luka Dončić, of all people, and relocated to Europe to be closer to her fiance Gilkes. She sold her Florida home on Longboat Key in 2020.

Pictured above, left, Alevtina Nelubina is a friend of Sharapova’s, reportedly from years back, and she seems to be a bit of an “influencer” although it’s unclear for whom or what. Suffice it to say that both women are Russian-born, and Mlle. Nelubina may, still, be living in the Russian imperium. For a few years running now, it’s been occasionally difficult to pin down where semi-expat Russians are anchored, if at all.

French tennis great Yannick Noah’s daughter Jenaye won the best-wild-new polo award for her extremely well designed blouse with puffy long-short-sleeves and a deep pointed collar with a great long placket in the early going on day three. It’s an unbeatable combo, a polo with a short tennis skirt, but she takes it here off-duty in the most relaxed French way. The source of her comfort with herself is not just that she spent her childhood at Roland Garros, although it is also that. She’s just comfortable in her skin, this Frenchwoman, and it shows brilliantly here. Kudos to Jenaye Noah, very much her own person, for her fashion wit.