“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.”