Olympic gears for display at Champs
The ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships, or Champs as it is popularly known, will have an Olympic presence this year, as the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA) and PUMA will showcase apparel designs for the Paris Olympic Games.
This Olympic fashion runway at a national sports event will be the first of its kind in Jamaica, with PUMA introducing the line of sporting gear customised for the Jamaican Olympic team.
JOA President Christopher Samuda said: “The designs met our approval, and their display will be an innovation, which will bring Olympism into the arena in reminding inspired youth that wearing the black, gold and green is genetic for its fashions character and tailors personal aspirations in sewing seeds of success.”
The National Stadium will once more be a focal point for Olympism, “a landmark from which sportsmen and women have been catapulted into being Olympic champions and global personalities and have become an inspiration to generations of youth,” JOA Secretary General/ CEO Ryan Foster, said.
The JOA/PUMA partnership continues to be creative in using sport to influence thought and action. President Samuda stated that “this activation by PUMA underscores that national sportswear should be an experience and an honour that go beyond what you wear to being how you wear it, as part of a country’s sporting legacy, and that’s Olympism”.
Foster added: “Ready-to-wear is market and sales driven by the current times, but custom built is driven by a ‘fit to size’ and bespoke value that characterises you now and stylises your future.”
Come next month, Jamaicans will get a taste of Paris. Olympic sportswear will be on show in Independence Park “inspired by boxoffice performances by Jamaican Olympians throughout the history of the games,” Secretary General/ CEO Foster remarked.
PUMA continues to demonstrate its confidence in the Jamaican Olympic movement, and this display of Jamaican sport haute couture is “the dress rehearsal of greater things to come” Samuda said.