Is the Super Bowl Becoming a Fashion Week?
Thom Browne is trading NYFW for Super Bowl glory, while the NFL will also host an Abercrombie & Fitch runway show.
Hi everyone, welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture.
Thom Browne was a conspicuous absence from the New York Fashion Week calendar in February. And now we know why. Yesterday, it was announced that the American designer will present his eponymous brand’s Fall/Winter 26 collection at the “GQ Bowl”, a sports-fashion event to be hosted in San Francisco in the days leading up to the Super Bowl.
The news came just days after a separate announcement, first reported by Vogue Business, that the NFL itself will host an unprecedented fashion show by Abercrombie & Fitch, also on the eve of the Super Bowl.
After years of athletes and sports teams infiltrating high profile moments on the fashion calendar, it appears fashion brands have begun to do the reverse. Top fashion brands are now looking to activate at marquee sporting events to stand out from the crowd and get infront of new consumer audiences and fresh prospective commercial partners.
These two events, though separately organised, are not coincidences. The GQ-hosted Thom Browne show and the Abercrombie show are the result of several years of strategising on the part of the NFL—through key hires, smart collaborations and savvy athlete positioning—to align itself with the fashion industry.
This shift has taken the NFL from being an organisation never before considered as adjacent to the fashion industry, to one of the more coveted sports properties in the world from a fashion POV.
Now, the Super Bowl is increasingly being used as a staging ground for fashion events. Last year’s inaugural GQ Bowl hosted a runway show by American label Bode. This time around in February, things are set to be taken up another notch with the Thom Browne show at the city’s Legion of Honor museum on Feb. 6.
It would be easy to write the Thom Browne show off as a gimmick, but the designer’s ties to (American) football go back to his childhood. Also, as the GQ announcement notes: “the designer has also served as his alma mater’s—the college football giant, University of Notre Dame—artist-in-residence. For years, he’s designed football-themed collections and even hosted annual pick-up matches on the campus—a tradition he began with his employees back in 2014.”
Finally, last year, during New York Fashion Week, Thom Browne and GQ partnered to host a pickup football game featuring all kinds of sports-culture-fashion adjacent cool kids.
Does Hosting a Fashion Show at the Super Bowl Make Sense?
It’s complicated. There are valid arguments on both sides:
No, it doesn’t make sense: the original idea of fashion shows is for brands to showcase their upcoming collections in front of as many important buyers, editors (and these days, influencers) to generate orders and positive coverage. Those people largely do not concern themselves with events such as the Super Bowl, and will be in the midst of fashion month travel. Any shows outside of that risk falling by the wayside.
Yes, it makes sense: the Super Bowl may well be the greatest annual sports culture show on earth. Choosing the Super Bowl—over a traditional fashion week—to host a runway show is smart business, especially for an established brand like Thom Browne, which will have stable relationships with buyers and media anyway. Plus, there are many who would argue that the purpose and importance of traditional fashion weeks is far from what it once was. As we saw recently with Balenciaga, luxury brands are all strategising how to align themselves with sports. There’s hardly a better way to do that than hosting a show at the Super Bowl.
As for Abercrombie & Fitch, a (once again) popular, mass-market, non-luxury label that wouldn’t typically appear at fashion week anyway, staging a fashion show makes a lot of sense. Hosted by the NFL—to which the brand has served as the official fashion partner since last year—the show will be sure to receive plenty of media coverage and social media exposure, leveraging the league’s network for both talent and reach. Abercrombie also gets market its licensed NFL product as well as any mainline pieces it wants to promote, and has the added benefit of being able to tell people it was the first ever brand to have a show hosted at the Super Bowl by the NFL in an official capacity.
It’s definitely not the case that hosting a show at the Super Bowl (instead of a traditional fashion week) would be the right thing to do for any brand. But in the cases of Thom Browne and Abercrombie, it appears to be a smart marketing play.
The cultural cachet of the Super Bowl and its draw as the premium sports-entertainment event on the calendar will only continue to soar. So too will fashion’s increasing fixation on the world of sport. The Super Bowl is already becoming something of a fashion week in its own right, and many brands will be taking note of the playbook being established by GQ and its early-mover brand partners like Bode and Thom Browne.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM
Great article!! Im so excited about this!
This was a banger.