PARIS - When Grand Slam champion Venus Williams stepped onto a French Open court in a see-through black lace dress with a red-trimmed top, the beleaguered lace industry let out a cheer.

Williams' corsetlike outfit -- reminiscent of a 19th-century Parisian cancan chorus costume -- startled many sports fans and prompted wolf whistles and catcalls. But it also intrigued fashion insiders, and lace designers are now hoping Williams' bold ensemble might boost their game.

"Seeing a tennis woman of Venus' calibre dolled up in lace and resembling more of a figure skater will hopefully revive the industry at a time when French lace makers are going out of business one after the other," said Isabelle Tartier, director of Paris-based Frank Sorbier, one of the few fashion houses that still uses lace.

The lace industry better enjoy this while it can. Williams said Friday that once she leaves the French Open the dress will be "retired."

"As great as the design is, I really want the focus to be on the tennis," she said.

Tartier blamed the industry's economic woes on cheaper Chinese-industrialized lace flooding the market.

"(It) is rarely made up of 100 per cent cotton like French handmade lace, and is supplemented with chemicals such as polyamide, which produces cheaper thread," she said.

Julien De la Rue, finance director at lace factory Solstiss in northern France, said his company's sales had dropped in the last three years from $38 million in 2006 to US$19 million in 2009.

"We've seen a decrease in demand these last two years primarily because lace has gone out of fashion. Designers prefer to use leather nowadays, so you simply don't see it on the catwalk," he said.

Williams designed the dress and has run her own fashion line Eleven since 2007.

"Lace has never been done before in tennis, and I've been wanting to do it for a long time," she said after her victory over Patty Schnyder on Sunday.

Williams' burlesque outfit, with its tutu and frills, didn't do much to disguise her skin-tone underwear and its "illusion of bareness," as Venus described. That illusion -- suggesting that she was naked under the lace -- is what set tongues wagging and photographers snapping wildly at her muscled, taupe-covered derriere.

"What's the point of wearing lace when there's just black under? The illusion of just having bare skin is definitely for me a lot more beautiful," Williams said.

Marcellous L. Jones, editor of Fashion Insider.com magazine, agreed.