It was, said Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History,” “an extension of the country club. And the costume reflected that.”

Sure, on the men’s side, Andre Agassi ushered in a moment of change with his mullet, jeans shorts and neon, scandalizing the powers that be. (He boycotted Wimbledon for three years because of the dress code.) And many of the sport’s previous Black players — Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Zina Garrison — dressed, Mr. Ford said, in the style of “respectability politics,” to fit in.

Mr. Ford called it “a different way of integrating a sport.”