Tennis and diamonds have shared a history for about a hundred years. Most people assume the connection is obvious. A sport played in pristine white, originally played on manicured grass, by some of the most photographed women in the world, would naturally feature jewellery. However, the relationship has an actual starting point, a gradual evolution, and, now, a second act in which jewellery brands aren’t just dressing tennis players, they are also designing with them.
The story begins like this: Chris Evert, who helped define an entire era of tennis along with her great rival Martina Navratilova in the 1970s and ’80s, lost her George Bedewi diamond bracelet mid-match. Evert refused to continue until the bracelet was found. When a reporter asked about it, she called it her “tennis bracelet”. While the details of this story have been corrected over time—for example, many reported it happened in 1987 instead of 1978, the correct year, the essence remains the same. It was the birth of a new jewellery category—sport and sparkle, fused by accident, forever.
The real origin story
The story of the tennis bracelet, however, goes back even further. In the 1920s, fashionable women stacked “diamond line” bracelets, which had no connection to sports at all. The tennis bracelet, in other words, is a century-old object that spent 50 years without its now inextricable name. Even the idea of a diamond bracelet on a tennis court predates Evert; actor Farrah Fawcett was seen wearing one courtside at a 1976 charity tennis match, two years before the Chris Evert incident.
A century before the name
If you’re looking for a true predecessor, you have to look back to 1920s and Suzanne Lenglen, the first global tennis celebrity, known to the French press as La Divine. Lenglen, who won eight Grand Slam singles titles and was nearly unbeatable for most of that decade, played wearing her signature bandeau headbands (sometimes pinned with natural diamonds) and silk stockings. Her flapper-inspired outfits designed by Jean Patou were considered scandalous for the time just because they showed her forearms and calves. Lenglen often secured her bandeau with a jewelled pin and used small French coins to keep her white silk stockings in place. Wimbledon, overwhelmed by her popularity, had to move to larger grounds to accommodate the crowds.
Lenglen never had a product named after her—but she was crucial in setting the standard for fashionable women in sports.
A ring of one’s own
There’s another micro-tradition worth mentioning: women wearing their engagement rings during major matches. In June this year, Serena Williams competed at Wimbledon while wearing her 12-carat diamond engagement ring from husband Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder she married in 2017. In 2004, Anna Kournikova was famously photographed at a charity World Team Tennis match wearing an ultra-rare 11-carat pink diamond ring rumoured to be priced between $5 to $6 million. Marie Claire, sizing up Aryna Sabalenka’s 14-carat ring against that lineage, called it as large as the ones Williams and Kournikova had worn before her.
Which is what makes Sabalenka’s choice this year so pointed. She got engaged in March 2026 to entrepreneur and sports investor Georgios Frangulis, then showed up at Wimbledon in full custom diamonds and emeralds—everything except the ring. The decision was practical: a stone that size might disrupt a serve. But it’s also a modern-day inversion of the Evert story. Where Evert’s bracelet coming loose in 1978 became the whole point, Sabalenka was consciously avoiding the exact kind of on-court jewellery accident that made it one.
The athlete has a new job description
Much has changed in the relationship between athletes and jewellery. Evert did not design, market, or profit from her bracelet; the designer George Bedewi did. But the situation has reversed today: the athlete is now the designer.
In early 2026, Aryna Sabalenka became the first jewellery ambassador for Material Good, a New York-based fine jewellery and watch retailer. She doesn’t just wear the brand’s pieces; she co-creates them with head designer Atara Lev. Each collection is designed for specific tournaments: a coastal set with sapphires for the Australian Open, a garnet-and-natural-diamond suite at Roland-Garros to match the red clay, and an emerald-and-natural-diamond set at Wimbledon inspired by her birthstone. The designs consider her need to play; pendants are hollowed to reduce weight, earrings have unobtrusive omega backs for comfort, and necklace closures are reinforced for security.
This addresses the Evert problem: how can you keep a diamond secure on a body that will sprint, lunge, and serve? Sabalenka has noted that the partnership allows her to design, be creative, and express her individuality. But even without formal partnerships, the US Open has become a showcase for natural diamond houses—courtside coverage now tracks watch and jewellery sponsorships the way it once focused only on outfits.
The view from the stands
The diamonds-on-court story has a second cast too: the celebrities in the stands. Wimbledon’s Centre Court has become its own runway for natural diamonds. At the 2025 Championships, Catherine, Princess of Wales, was seen in an all-new diamond pendant necklace from British jeweller Daniella Draper, paired with her signature Cartier Trinity earrings. On the final two days she stacked a new diamond eternity ring alongside her sapphire engagement ring for the first time. Sienna Miller paired a tennis bracelet with a diamond-and-gold bangle from British designer Jessica McCormack. Meanwhile Daisy Edgar-Jones wore a plain white-gold tennis necklace to the men’s final, and model Jourdan Dunn matched a tennis necklace to a tennis bracelet—the style turning up, fittingly, on the people watching the tennis rather than playing it.
This year, the matches continued to remain haute. In attendance? The usual mix of royals and A-listers with Catherine, Princess of Wales, returning courtside in her now-familiar rotation of Cartier Trinity pieces. Serena Williams also made headlines by stepping back onto the Wimbledon lawns at 44, wearing her diamond engagement ring and a matching manicure, her first appearance there since retiring from singles in 2022.
Tennis left the chat
Between the players and the people watching them, the word ‘tennis bracelet’ has done a lot of work over the past century—and along the way, it stopped being attached to tennis at all. ‘Tennis’, in jewellery terms has now come to mean a specific construction: a continuous line of uniform natural diamonds, set close together, flexible enough to move with the body. It has come to signify a piece of jewellery that’s classic, elegant, just like the natural diamonds that it’s set with and the sport that it’s named after. Except, the sport gave the object its name and then let it wander off without it. Now there’s tennis everything—necklaces, chokers, even rings—and we’re not complaining.
Which puts Sabalenka’s hollowed-out pendants and Evert’s broken clasp on the same continuum, even though one happened by accident and the other by design. Diamonds were never built with a tennis match in mind. But for almost 50 years, tennis players have kept finding reasons to wear them anyway, and lately, they’ve started designing the jewellery themselves. And as far as the current-day relationship between diamonds and tennis is concerned, it looks like—despite the 100-year-old-history—the games have only just begun.
