Osaka stars on January 2025 cover of Harper’s Bazaar Australia

Ahead of the start of the 2025 season Down Under, Naomi Osaka is starring on the Australian cover of one of the world’s biggest fashion magazines, Harper’s Bazaar.

The former World No.1 and the two-time Australian Open champion will kick off her 2025 season at the ASB Classic in Auckland — for the first time in eight years, she’ll play a tournament outside of Australia to start the season — and she’s hitting the interview circuit as she seeks a first match win in Melbourne since 2022.

Clad in Louis Vuitton and other luxe brands for a glamorous photo shoot, Osaka speaks candidly to writer Tracey Holmes about the concepts as she reflects on the concepts of freedom and inner peace.

“Freedom looks different for so many, and for me, it’s even different depending on where I am in my life,” she says.

Osaka brought a renewed perspective and a refreshed outlook to her tennis career in her comeback from maternity leave in 2024 — even though her season ended prematurely due to a back injury, suffered competing at the China Open in Beijing. Now, at age 27 and a year into the second phase of her athletic career as a mother after her daughter Shai’s 2023 birth, Holmes writes that Osaka knows that freedom she’s craved since she broke through with her first US Open victory in 2018 — and become one of the world’s highest-paid athletes, a mental-health advocate after revealing her battle with anxiety and depression, and an off-court entrepreneur with her own agency and production company — “is not a destination but rather a never-ending journey.”

“Right now, freedom for me is being able to spend time with my daughter, to see joy in her eyes and to know that, as long as I am there for her, and a role model for her, then no other outside voice matters,” Osaka adds. “In the end, I have found that after becoming a mom, my question has shifted to a really simple one, which is, win or lose, am I still really loving playing the game?”

The story also reveals Osaka’s forthcoming partnership with the cosmetics brand Maybelline — which she wears for the photo shoot — and its Brave Together campaign which provides one-on-one resources for people battling their own mental health challenges.

“I am still working on finding true freedom in my life, but staying true to my beliefs has  definitely helped me reach some sense of personal freedom,” Osaka says. “It has also helped me to put less pressure on myself to be perfect, to bounce right back, to always agree with the group. I work really hard also to be a voice for others who may not have found their own voices yet — [and] that was me for so long.”

Shareholder Bazaar issue hits newsstands on Dec. 30.