It's been high time Samantha Stosur and Lacoste found their place in our well-known overviews of women's tennis fashion. This is our first feature of the best-ranked Australian WTA player and the French brand of Lacoste with tradition dating back to 1933.

Stosur's orange Lacoste dress received a lot of exposure, as she wore it at six tournaments, including the Australian Open, and at two Fed Cup ties, in Adelaide and Kharkiv.

In the above dark version of the same dress Stosur reached her first Grand Slam final, at the 2010 French Open.

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Dear readers,

I would like to let you know that I participated in this year's edition of the Players to Watch series at On the Baseline and that this time I picked Serbian Bojana Jovanovski as a young player you should pay more attention to in 2011. I hope you will enjoy my article entitled "Bojana Jovanovski introduces new Serbian tennis generation to the WTA Tour". I have to give exposure to home stars.

Talking about fellow tennis blog On the Baseline, I would also like to remind you that you can vote for Women's Tennis Blog in the run for the best tennis blog in the 2010 Baseline Awards. Unlike in the previous years when only one vote per person was allowed, now you can vote practically as many times as you want. I have to say I prefer the old method when everyone could vote just once, but we have to adapt to the circumstances, so if you voted just once, and have time to vote again and again, well, why not! (photo: © Neal Trousdale)

Thanks to DeShawn Besabella I learned about two awesome videos showcasing Nike dresses and shoes tailored for Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova for the 2011 Australian Open. The apparel is presented by Nike staff themselves: Nike Tennis product line manager, Alex Chan, and Nike Tennis creative director, Janice Lucena.

Serena probably had the best tennis clothes in the season behind us, along with adidas adilibria representatives, and judging by this sophisticated Australian Open dress and Nike Air Max Mirabella 3 shoes, the year to come will be equally flattering when it comes to fashion. Only that Serena will not have much chance to wear it. It's already confirmed that she'll skip the Australian Open, and no one knows when she'll come back. Serena's white and blue Australian Open dress will probably be worn by Victoria Azarenka. But I suppose the dress would look better on Serena's bustier body.

Nike came up with a peach and light gray color scheme for Maria Sharapova's strap dress, Nike Lunarlon Speed 3 shoes and warm-up jacket. The dress is supposed to have the touches of Australia, especially the back part which should look like a boomerang. The dress is essentially nice, but is not breathtaking or innovative, unlike many past dresses of Maria Sharapova.

Maria Sharapova will officially not use Prince racquets any more, and the word is out that her new brand of choice is Head, even though her agent refused to comment on the subject. The 23-year-old Sharapova had played with Prince since she was nine and won all three of her Grand Slam titles with that racquet.

And although Sharapova's partnership with Head is not official yet, this Nike promo for the Australian Open 2011 clearly shows the Russian is using Head now. (Jacob, thanks for sharing the pic with me!).

There's another partnership change in tennis - Melanie Oudin, who was wearing adidas and famously promoted their Barricade shoes with inspirational messages "believe" and "courage", will now be sporting Wilson's apparel and footwear. The American has been using Wilson’s Blade racquet, but has now become a Wilson exclusive player, having switched to their clothing as well.

There’s one more novelty concerning Oudin and Wilson – the 19-year-old will be swinging her new Blade 98 Pink BLX racquet starting in Australia. (Magdalena, thank you for telling me about this!)

Everyone was talking about former world No.4 Jelena Dokic during the Australian Open playoffs and she reached the final, however, she didn’t manage to go all the way and was defeated  by 259th-ranked and eight years younger Olivia Rogowska 1-6 7-6(3) 6-3 in the rain-interrupted match.

Nevertheless, Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley hinted that Dokic could receive one of the four discretionary wildcards, because she made the playoffs final, showed determination, good form and was working on her preparation.

"She's done everything that's been asked of her to give herself another real opportunity," said Tiley.

The 19-year-old Rogowska played the Australian Open two times, in 2009 and 2010, and lost in the first round on both occasions. Dokic, currently ranked 137th, won the playoffs for a wildcard into the 2009 Australian Open and was the story of the tournament when she reached the quarterfinals. Last year at the Australian Open, Dokic lost in the first round to Alisa Kleybanova. (photo: Stephane Martinache)

Especially for our readers Sam and Stiven who requested this, as part of our regular overviews of tennis fashion, let's have a look at all the outfits Chinese brand ANTA had in store for Jelena Jankovic for the second year of their partnership.

ANTA seems to love lively colors, but to me it looks like they are trying to distract our attention from poor designs. Is it just me?

Nike did a much better job incorporating vibrant colors, as you can see on the examples of Serena Williams' 2010 dresses. Nike's colors are much subtler, more innovative and their hues are nicer.

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When it comes to 2010 tennis fashion and Venus Williams, the leitmotif throughout the season was a lifting bottom part of dresses. Venus apparently felt like showing off her booty this year, as she herself is the creator of these EleVen designs.

I like the EleVen dresses which combined black and red with sexy lingerie-inspired look. Very unique, different from other brands, you could immediately tell it was EleVen. The Roland Garros dress looks cute, with a combination of ballet innocence and sexy lace. But, there's a big "but", I like the dress when it's still!

In action it was the biggest disaster of Roland Garros, evidenced below.

What possessed Venus to wear that? Read more »

Retired Romanian ATP player, Andrei Pavel, is the new coach of Jelena Jankovic. The 36-year-old Pavel won three ATP singles titles and six doubles titles and had a career-high ranking of No. 13.

The information is still not fully confirmed yet, and there is no news on Jelena Jankovic's official website, but a lot of media are reporting about this partnership, even saying how Jankovic tacitly confirmed the story.

Pavel, who considers backhand his best shot, quit professional tennis last year. (photos: Blu Angel and Stephane Martinache)