Naomi Osaka Returns to US Open as a Mother and Fashion Entrepreneur
Naomi Osaka arrives at the US Open with a racket in one hand and a new world in the other.
On Monday, August 31, the two-time US Open champion opens her 2026 campaign at Flushing Meadows against Anastasia Zakharova. It is familiar territory for Osaka on the court, yet almost everything around her has changed.
‘My main job is to be a mom’
Her final stop before New York was supposed to be the Cincinnati Open. Instead, her name quietly disappeared from the draw. The official line was fatigue. The real reason was far simpler, and far more telling.
“I think people forget my main job is to be a mom. This [tennis] is kind of like my side hustle a little bit. I just happen to be really good at it,” Osaka said.
She stayed home with her three-year-old daughter, Shai. No tune-up tournament. No scramble for ranking points. Just time in the role she now puts above all others.
Yet there is no hint of hesitation about her readiness. Osaka, 28, arrives in New York convinced the hard courts still feel like home.
“I do feel like I’ve played a lot of matches… Honestly, this is the surface that I’m most comfortable with,” she said during her build-up, sounding more like the ruthless champion of old than a part-time player.
Her personal life has shifted too. During her run at the Washington Open, she casually revealed she has a new boyfriend, another reminder that the person walking into Arthur Ashe Stadium is not the same young star who once shouldered the sport’s expectations alone.
From baseline to runway
Since landing in New York, Osaka has leaned hard into her other great love: fashion.
Between practice sessions at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, she slipped out of the training gear and into a different arena, heading to Southampton to announce the next phase of her off-court evolution — her own line of luxury accessories.
Osaka has long treated match days as a canvas, turning walk-ons into statements with bold colors, sharp silhouettes, and fearless styling. Now she wants to control the entire frame.
During a fireside chat at the Fame to Fortune Summit, she unveiled a prototype of one of her new handbags and described the brand as her “biggest dream” outside of tennis, according to Variety.
“Being a really good tennis player has given me a lot of amazing opportunities to invest and also just to surround myself with some really great people and I feel like that’s gotten me to this point where I want to create my own thing,” she told Fortune’s executive editorial director Diane Brady.
“It’s something that I want to pour all my energy into because I believe in it too with all my heart.”
The message was clear: tennis opened the door; now she wants to design the room.
Serving looks at Flushing Meadows
The US Open has always been a stage, and Osaka is treating it like one.
Before practice, after practice, in the media room, in the gym — she turned the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center into the backdrop for a fashion photoshoot. Not as a stunt, she insists, but as a natural extension of who she is.
“Whenever the ideas come in my head, I just really want to do it,” she said.
“Honestly, like, nothing I do, I do to make a statement,” she added of the photos around the grounds. “I think it just ends up being that way.”
That is the paradox of Osaka. She claims no desire to be symbolic, yet everything she does carries weight — from withdrawing to be with her daughter to launching a luxury line to posing in the empty corridors of a Grand Slam venue.
“But I literally do the things that I love to do, and I feel like people relate to it, and I’m really glad and grateful for that, because I feel like the type of person I am, a lot of people can see themselves in me. I really, honestly, I love that about myself.”
On Monday, the focus snaps back to the baseline. The lights, the noise, the first-round tension against Zakharova. Osaka will walk into the cauldron as a mother, a designer, an entrepreneur — and still, undeniably, one of the most dangerous hard-court players in the world.
The question now is not whether she can juggle it all. It’s how far this new version of Naomi Osaka can carry her, and how much of that journey she plans to rewrite on the courts of New York.
