Serena Williams’s Fashion Smash The game-changing tennis player used her clothes as a statement of self and a weapon of change.

 When Serena Williams steps out onto the hard courts of the U.S. Open on Monday for what may be her last tournament, she will do so in a little black (tennis) dress with long sheer sleeves, a six-layer skirt — one tier for every U.S. Open title she has won — and a bodice sparkling with a galaxy of stars. It is a dress made for a supernova’s farewell. It is fitting, in more ways than one. If you’re not paying attention to the symbolism, you’re whiffing the point.

After all, Ms. Williams did reveal her plans to end her tennis career in an essay published not in ESPN or Sports Illustrated or Tennis Week but in the September issue of Vogue. Though the choice, with its accompanying cover shoot of Ms. Williams in an array of evening gowns, was met with some head-scratching in the sports world, it should have surprised no one.

When Ms. Williams and her older sister, Venus, arrived on the scene, women’s tennis dress, like tennis itself, was still stuck in the mire of tradition, associated with an antiquated image of a blond pony-tailed sprite zipping around a court in a teeny tiny little “skirt” or “dress” that was like a notional remnant of the longer dresses that came before.

It was highly gendered, in the most stereotypical kind of way (this is a sport, after all, where until the late 20th century female tennis players wore frilly bloomers, like baby dolls, under their faux skirts) and very white. Literally, in the case of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, a.k.a. Wimbledon, where the player dress code specifies dress color.

It was, said Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History,” “an extension of the country club. And the costume reflected that.”

The Nike dress Serena Williams will wear at the U.S. Open on Monday. It has a six-layer skirt, one for each of the six U.S. Open titles Ms. Williams has won.Credit...via Nike

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She always had a bigger plan than just sports, and it was an intention embedded in the imagery she helped create. It was never just about adding a stripe here, some neon there. It was about self-realization, about expanding the definition of what was possible in myriad ways — physically, professionally — and who got to decide.