Last night, during a break in the action at this year’s GQ Men of the Year saloon shindig at the Chateau Marmont, the crowd gathered ’round the DJ booth for our annual tradition: the awarding of the Big Fit of the Night medal.
This year, the stakes were a bit different—the party’s theme was American Rodeo, and we requested that our guests dress accordingly in their best “Hollywood Western” attire. In a year when cowboycore ruled our wardrobes and the music charts, now felt as good a time as any to giddy on up, sartorially speaking.
So it only made sense for GQ global editorial director Will Welch to call “the great, beautiful, and extremely fly Naomi Osaka” to the booth to accept her Big Fit medal. The frontier-transcending pro-tennis star is already a fashion maverick.
For GQ’s American Rodeo, Osaka wore a saloon-ready Amiri getup: a relaxed white shirt, loosened black leather necktie, and studded black trousers. Wearing her hair down in long, blond-flecked braids, she accessorized with a black felt hat and tobacco-toned suede cowboy boots by Havva.
After Osaka removed her wide-brimmed hat for Welch to place the medal around her neck, Welch asked the tennis champ to share a few words.
“I don’t know if you should trust me with a microphone in my hand,” joked the refreshingly outspoken tennis champ. She shouted out Mike Amiri’s namesake label, who designed her getup, as well as the hearty sartorial efforts of the rest of the partygoers. “I was surveying everyone’s outfits and everyone looks amazing,” she said.
But Osaka—whose 2024 return to the courts after giving birth to her and partner Cordae’s first child last year was often sidelined by injuries and upsets—had one more zinger for the crowd.
“It feels great to win a medal this year,” she said with a laugh, as the crowd cheered. And that’s a feeling we can all raise a glass to.
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