Between her out­fits at the 2010 US Open and the 2011 Aus­tralian Open, Nadia Petrova made pretty much every worst dressed list out there. Her US Open out­fit was com­prised of sep­a­rates, both of the same rain­bow striped pat­tern. Let’s just say it was nei­ther flat­ter­ing nor aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing. Things didn’t get much bet­ter when Nadia appeared at the Aus­tralian Open in a dress that resem­bled tie-die cot­ton candy. The dress was pur­ple on top and bot­tom and blue in the mid­dle, and it was all frills from the waist down. Once again, poor Nadia ended up on a lot of worst dressed lists, includ­ing mine.

So, when I found out that Nadia would be attend­ing the media All Access Hour on Mon­day, I imme­di­ately wanted to ask about the fash­ion choices. But how do you ask some­one why their clothes are so ugly? You call them bold, that is how. I asked Nadia a cou­ple of ‘real’ ques­tions about ten­nis and she seemed extremely open and friendly. I decided the fash­ion ques­tion was in. Here is a copy of our exchange.

Q. Recently you’ve made some pretty bold fash­ion choices on court. How much input…

A. Oh my god. That has noth­ing to do with me. Those are not my choices.

Q. That’s what I was won­der­ing, how much input do you have in your outfits?

A. This is what Ellesse sends me.

Q. So you don’t say, ‘this is what I want,’ you don’t meet with them? They just send them to you?

A. I don’t have a say. Um, I did actu­ally pro­vide them with some of my sketches because I know what really flat­ters my physique, my figure.

Q. Do you think they’ll take them into account?

A. Well they haven’t done it yet…and actu­ally this is my last year with them. So I don’t see why they would com­pro­mise. They do what they think are sell­ing in Japan and they are just send­ing it to me.

I could barely stop laugh­ing dur­ing our exchange because she sounded so exas­per­ated by the sit­u­a­tion. I can’t even imag­ine her reac­tion when she opened the box and found the rain­bow num­ber from the US Open. As she said in the inter­view, her con­tract with Ellesse expires at the end of the year, and I have a feel­ing she won’t be renew­ing. I’m inter­ested to see if her kits will become a bit more tame.

On another note, I have never been to Japan, but I really hope that rain­bow out­fit wasn’t a bestseller.