Serena Williams brought a surprise guest to the Met Gala: A little one on the way
Serena Williams brought not one, but two guests to this year’s Met Gala: her husband, Alexis Ohanian, and a baby on the way.
The tennis superstar revealed Monday that she and the Reddit co-founder are expecting their second child by showing off her baby bump on the Met Gala carpet. The pregnant athlete and producer wore a sparkly pink-and-black Gucci blazer, a matching Gucci dress with a tulle mermaid tail and lots of Tiffany pearls to the star-studded event.
“Was so excited when Anna Wintour invited the 3 of us to the Met Gala,” Williams wrote Monday on Instagram.
Serena Williams is cradling her baby, humming a lullaby, letting little Alexis Olympia Ohanian tug on a strand of her long hair.
Before she retired from tennis last year, the Grand Slam champion and Olympic gold medalist penned an essay for Vogue explaining her decision to step away from sports and focus on expanding her family.
“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair,” Williams said at the time.
“If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. ... I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”
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In September 2017, Williams and Ohanian welcomed their first child: a baby girl named Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. Williams — who was two months pregnant when she won the Australian Open in 2017 — gave birth to her daughter by emergency C-section and underwent multiple surgeries after the baby arrived.
“This morning, my daughter, Olympia, who turns five this month, and I were ... in my car, and she’s holding my phone, using an interactive educational app she likes. This robot voice asks her a question: What do you want to be when you grow up? She doesn’t know I’m listening, but I can hear the answer she whispers into the phone. She says, ‘I want to be a big sister,’” Williams wrote in her Vogue essay.
“Olympia says this a lot, even when she knows I’m listening. Sometimes before bed, she prays to Jehovah to bring her a baby sister. (She doesn’t want anything to do with a boy!) I’m the youngest of five sisters myself, and my sisters are my heroes, so this has felt like a moment I need to listen very carefully to.”
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Williams wasn’t the only Met Gala attendee to hard-launch her pregnancy on Monday night. Supermodel Karlie Kloss also revealed that she and her husband, Joshua Kushner, are expecting their second child. They welcomed their first — a boy named Levi Joseph — in March 2021.
Kloss and her baby bump stepped out in a black custom Loewe gown inspired by the late Karl Lagerfeld’s spring-summer 1983 collection for Chanel. The theme of this year’s Met Gala centered on the German designer and Chanel creative director, who died in February 2019.
“This is the most important night in fashion, of course, and I’m honestly surprised I could keep [the pregnancy] a secret this long,” Kloss told Entertainment Tonight on the Met Gala carpet.
“Big winter coats, big winter coats.”
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