Maria Sharapova will return to the U.S. Open next week—and when she does she’ll be wearing a Swarovski-studded tennis dress by Riccardo Tisci for Nike. The all-black look, featuring technical lace and eyelet-like perforations, will be Sharapova’s uniform for her night matches. The design is not only striking for its high fashion sensibilities—really, when was the last time you saw lace or crystals on an athlete?—but also for its all-black palette, a far cry from the preppy spirit of tennis. “It was always going to be black. It wasn’t even a question of what we were going to do for the night matches,” said Sharapova, curled up on a couch at Nike’s headquarters in New York.

The reason for the color? In 2006, Sharapova won the Open in a black dress. “When I think of anywhere that I play, I want to bring a sense of elegance to the feeling that I have when I walk onto the court. That’s what I felt with the 2006 dress, and what I really wanted to relive in this dress is the moment of elegance and thinking of Audrey Hepburn and her classic Givenchy dress,” she said. As luck would have it, Tisci, the former Givenchy creative director, has become Nike’s most prolific fashion collaborator, taking on everything from its Dunk sneakers to creating a full range of athletic apparel in psychedelic florals for the 2016 Olympics. Sharapova added, “There are so many things that really make sense in this collaboration. The inspiration was there from the first moment that we sat down together.”

“I respect Maria so much as an athlete, and she respects me so much as a designer, and both of us work for Nike, so it came up as a collaboration that we’d like to do together. To me, it was very special to design an outfit for an athlete playing on the courts,” Tisci said via phone from Ibiza. “That moment she had in 2006 was a very iconic moment, and we wanted to honor it and be inspired by it. We decided to use lace and crystal, which are very me, and black, which is my favorite color and very representative of my career but also the color that has brought a lot of luck for her. So when we started talking about this project, it just made sense.”