How the NFL Became a Fashion Business

Collaborations, a key hire, stylish young players, one very famous pop star and the allure of the Super Bowl helped the league become coveted by fashion. Plus, what I'm watching in sports culture.

Hi gang, and welcome back to SportsVerse, your bi-weekly analysis of all things at the intersection of sports culture, money, and fashion, brought lovingly to you by me, DYM.

Today, we’re talking all things *football, as I unpack how the NFL and some of its athletes have become an unlikely fixation of the fashion industry over the past year, thanks to a flurry of unexpected collaborations, one very famous pop star, a key internal hire, a new generation of fashion-forward players and the ever-growing allure of the Super Bowl as the dream marketing showcase.

(*Trigger warning for my British readers—35 percent of you—I will be using the curse word “soccer” to refer to what we call football, and the word “football” to describe what the Americans call, well, football. It’s just going to work out easier like that today!)

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But first, here are three things I’m watching in sports culture right now.

1. Baggy shorts in the Premier League are so back. Shorts got very short and tracksuits got very tight in the late 2010s, but players like Nottingham Forest’s Ola Aina and Murillo are running things all the way back. VERSUS summed it up.

2. Youwasntder is getting the people of London off the internet and running through the streets like you’ve never seen it before, all in the name of fitness and wellbeing. Corporate run clubs, watch out.

3. New Balance sneakers are selling like crazy. The brand reached record annual sales of $7.8 billion last year, up from $6.5 billion the year before and up from just $3.3 billion in 2020. It's closing on its $10 billion revenue target.

Also, please don’t forget to refer your friends to SportsVerse for insights and good times they can’t get anywhere else. You can win some prizes while doing it.

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Earlier this week, The Business of Fashion’s Haley Crawford reported that GQ Magazine and Bode were teaming up to host the GQ Bowl, a fashion show designed to blend sports, style, and culture, on Feb 7 in New Orleans, ahead of Super Bowl LIX.

For years now, media has covered the growing convergence of sports and fashion—I should know, that was my job for several years at BoF. Up until recently, crossovers between the two worlds typically took the form of collaborations with teams and athletes from popular global sports like soccer, basketball and tennis.

Sports like (American) football and baseball, however, traditionally found it harder to align their teams and athletes—and their hyper-masculine reputations—with the fashion industry. It’s no surprise that NFL athletes haven’t always been considered ideal fashion muses—it’s hard to build collections and sell products based on the appeal of 110kg-plus men who run around in tight, stretchy fabrics with their faces covered by helmets.

The sport hasn’t traditionally lent itself to collaborations with the fashion world. (Image: NFL)

But the GQ Bowl is the latest indication that things are changing. Fashion businesses increasingly consider the NFL as a valuable arena in which to market products, reach new consumers and gain valuable airtime. It makes perfect sense—the Super Bowl is the biggest and most lucrative sporting show on Earth, and fashion brands have the unique ability to get valuable marketing exposure for their products during the game, without having to pay millions of dollars for a 30-second commercial slot.

But even beyond the Super Bowl, developments in the sport over the past year show that brands and designers and the league itself now see value in creating fashion activations, limited edition collections and collaborations all year round, not just every February.

The NFL’s Fashion Game

That Bode—a high-end New York menswear label so popular among the fashion girlies that at one point, just over half its consumers were women—is the brand supporting a Super Bowl event, tells you all you need to know about how far the NFL has come.

Sure, the Super Bowl would often catch the eye of the fashion media, which would spend the following days dissecting which brands the Half Time Show performer was wearing and who styled them. Rihanna’s bright red Salomon x MM6 Maison Margiela sneakers and matching custom Alaïa puffer in 2023, was one such example. It marked a crowning moment for the ascent of Salomon—once a little-known outdoor footwear and equipment brand discarded by Adidas—into one of the most coveted lifestyle sneaker brands in the world.

Kristin Juszczyk recently launched Off Season, a new brand aiming to merge football and fashion, off the back of her breakout success in 2024.

But even still, the NFL’s relationship with fashion was still relatively passive at this point.

A lot has changed since then. Let’s take a look:

• January 2024: on the opening weekend of the playoffs, Kristin Juszczyk, partner of 49ers’ fullback Kyle, gained overnight fame when she designed a viral jacket for Taylor Swift, repurposing a Travis Kelce jersey. She also made a similar jacket from a Patrick Mahomes jersey for his wife.

• By the end of January, the league signs an unprecedented deal with Juszczyk, granting her a license to use NFL logos on designs.

• February: GQ hosts a soirée with Farfetch (RIP) and Stefon Diggs ahead of the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

• October: the NFL becomes the first major sports league (and to be honest, probably the first sports league of any kind) to hire a full-time fashion editor, promoting the very talented stylist and lovely human Kyle Smith from his already interesting role as fashion content strategist. Vogue broke the news.

• That same month, womenswear designer Veronica Beard partners with the NFL on a line of 32 blazers.

• December: the league announces a collaboration with Tyler, The Creator’s Golf Wang label, which included apparel like varsity jackets and sweaters along with various accessories.

• January 2025: Juszczyk and Emma Grede—the superwoman behind megabrands like Skims—founded OffSeason, a new label offering assortment of puffer jackets, coats and vests for five NFL teams.

NFL x Golf Wang. (Image: Golf Wang)

That wasn’t all—but you get the picture. There were also tie-ups with brands like Kitch and Abercrombie & Fitch. Meanwhile, Kyle Smith did great work in expanding the profile of the league and the off-field credentials of its players, taking the likes of Bengals’ quarterback Joe Burrow to Paris Fashion Week in June, where he was a front row fixture alongside Justin Jefferson, with whom he also walked in the start-studded Vogue World show.

voguemagazine

A post shared by @voguemagazine

Smith has also done great work underscoring the cultural importance of some of the league’s more stylish players to the fashion industry’s biggest players. In June, he accompanied Jefferson to an Hermès runway show and was alongside Amon-Ra St. Brown at Jil Sander in Paris. On a more regular basis, Smith is the architect of Burrow’s pre-game tunnel walk looks, such as this all-black Bottega ’fit.

This is not to say that 2024 was the first time that the NFL began collaborating with the fashion world. There have been isolated crossovers going back several years. But a confluence of factors—the Taylor Swift factor, rising awareness of female football fan bases and the need to cater to them with bespoke merch, and the full-scale collision of fashion and sport last year—allowed the NFL to truly begin exploring its value to the fashion industry.

Many sports organisations want to get into fashion but don’t employ or consult experts from the industry to understand how to navigate its codes and idiosyncrasies. Smith fills that all-important role on the roster as the NFL’s inside man.

That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I’m grateful to everyone who reached out after my previous article to share their views on the athlete endorsement market and the shifting power dynamics between sports stars and the brands seeking to partner with them. There will be plenty more on that down the line, so stay locked into SportsVerse!

Until next time,

DYM