TUNNEL VISIONS
as one of the few leagues to continue playing with relative normalcy over the past year, the NBA has been a boon to deprived sports fans. It has also been catnip for menswear aficionados. In the absence of fashion runway presentations, the arena entrances of today’s style-obsessed gladiators are a viable showcase for fashion trends. There is no shortage of Instagram accounts, such as @LeagueFits, devoted to the likes of Los Angeles Clipper Serge Ibaka preening in fit-for-purpose Tom Ford, or James Harden and P. J. Tucker flexing in print-on-print getups on the actual red carpet that the Houston Rockets have rolled out in the tunnel before games.
Not surprisingly, at a time when original Air Jordan 1 sneakers are fetching more than a half-million dollars at auction while influential sports like golf remain trapped in a fashion sand trap, the design world has rushed the sidelines like Spike Lee at a Knicks playoff game. At Fendi, Silvia Venturini Fendi has created an activewear collection inspired by the game, right down to the logo-laden high tops. In a first for Louis Vuitton, the prestige house’s menswear designer, Virgil Abloh, a hypebeast magnet and avowed Chicago Bulls fan, has collaborated with the NBA on an ongoing collection of haute sportswear comprising the basketball equivalent of boardroom-to-cocktail-party dressing: everything from game-arrival gear to travel essentials, such as the label’s signature bags plus dapper blazers and trousers for mandatory press conferences.
who owns a proper fashion-plate moment in a shrunken Thom Browne short-suit with an alligator man bag.
If the cut of one’s tailor has become an extension of a player’s personal brand, a part of the canon of masculine connoisseurship alongside cars and cigars, it helps that today’s status-conscious exemplars of male glamour are combative by nature. “It’s like seeing your friend have a great bottle of wine and wanting it, too,” McLeod says. “These guys are highly competitive and are pushing each other to be more expressive and original.”
But fashion, as any astute observer will attest, is one big retro cycle. It remains to be seen whether LeBron and Co. will jump on the bandwagon of average Joes everywhere in ditching their designer tailoring for the type of baggy sweat suits that would make Allen Iverson proud.