Now that the National Football League (NFL) has its own in-house fashion editor and on Sunday aired the first-ever Super Bowl red carpet arrivals show, someone should get started coordinating next year’s schedules. Super Bowl LIX happened smack dab in the middle of New York Fashion Week, which wouldn’t seem like a conflict, but these days, football and fashion are locked in a love fest aimed at boosting both industries’ audiences.
NBA players embraced fashion designers like Thom Browne years ago — but the NFL this year fully committed and one-upped basketball. It began long before Sunday’s game with a series of licensed designer collaborations — an early experiment was a 2023 Pride collection with Humberto Leon, while others followed, including Staud, Veronica Beard, Todd Snyder and Hugo Boss. Those worked their way up to Super Bowl fashion week, which began Friday with a green carpet sponsored by GQ and a runway show for fashion label Bode, whose designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla abandoned NYFW to show in New Orleans, where the game was hosted.
A pop-up fashion shop at the game sold the few remaining pieces from Willy Chavarria’s collection with Kendrick Lamar, who performed at half-time. One hit was a $750 bomber jacket with “Lamar” on one shoulder and the NFL logo on the other.
There are several good reasons for this football-fashion moment, and all of them have to do with audience and revenue growth for both industries.
“Our core audience is very male between 35 and 55,” says Xaimara Coss, NFL’s licensing director who is responsible for retail and fashion. “The NFL is really looking to connect with a younger, more diverse audience. It’s about how do we stay culturally relevant?”
Fashion brands would love to connect with more males between 35 and 55. And young diverse people and women, in particular, are a growth focus for the NFL, which is also campaigning to make women’s flag football a varsity sport in all 50 states.
The NFL wants to attract the folks who shop at Louis Vuitton, says Liana Bailey, an NFL spokeswoman for retail, tech and global partnerships. She points to the Willy Chavarria collaboration. “The NFL is not in the luxury space,” she says. “That got us there.”
The tricky part is that fashion’s touchy identity politics are central to the business. Pride, women’s healthcare choices and an embrace of diversity and inclusion are under fire from the Trump administration, MAGA and many hardcore football fans. To grow, the NFL has to balance the desires of those existing white male middle-aged fans with the often conflicting interests of the fans it hopes to acquire, many of whom, in fashion, have wholeheartedly embraced DEI.
Coss says the NFL receives hateful comments from football fans about some of its fashion initiatives, particularly on Instagram. “They’re very vocal about it,” she says. “They’re not very nice.”
“We’ve had angry fans, but we have to keep doing it,” she continues. “There are gay people and LGBTQ+ [people] who love us. We have to continue. We can’t stop.”
The NFL’s new fashion editor Kyle Smith embodies this. He’s a 31-year-old gay Black man who previously worked as a private stylist in Los Angeles. Hired in October, he’s the first person to hold the editor title. Today’s players are embracing his NFL role, even hiring him independently to style them off the field. In earlier generations, Smith says, “either you were a man and you liked football and sports, or you liked fashion, but you couldn’t like both. It was very much a masculine-feminine divide. What I love about Gen Z and Gen Alpha is understanding you can be a multi-faceted person. You can be interested in sports and fashion, interested in style, but also like going to the gym every day and killing it and dominating on the field.”
Ahead of the GQ Bowl, host to Bode Rec.’s first runway show, Emily Adams Bode Aujla talks building out the Bode world — athletics and beyond.
Players and their wives and girlfriends are ripe to be embraced as one of the few celebrity groups that haven’t been fully plumbed by fashion, which has bowled through actors, musicians and influencers.
If you don’t already, you’ll soon know Kristin Juszczyk, wife of San Francisco 49ers tight end Kyle Juszczyk. She started reworking team apparel for her own game-day looks and launched a website called DesignsByKristin.com. Her concept took off after Taylor Swift, who the world knows is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, wore one of her jackets. Now, Kristin has joined up with fashion entrepreneur Emma Grede — Good American, Skims — to launch Off Season, an enticing line of NFL-team-themed puffer coats, sold at NFLShop.com, Fanatics and the brand’s online store. On Monday, the Eagles running back Saquon Barkley’s $395 puffer had sold out.
The NFL is still fine-tuning its fashion sense, and didn’t initially recognise the potential in Kristin’s designs when she approached them about collaborating three years ago, says Coss. “We actually said no to her several times before we said yes.”
Creating fashion stars from footballers
The NFL also hopes to use fashion to promote its way out of its helmet conundrum. Players labour in anonymity, their grimaces and celebrations hidden beneath helmets. “You really just know their number. For us to give them personality for fans to get to know them better, we look at fashion and gaming and music,” says Bailey.
That’s a big part of Smith’s role as the league’s fashion editor. He was a freelance personal stylist until he landed at the NFL after starting an Instagram account that showed off players’ outfits.
Smith has found himself playing a role that should be filled by highly paid agents: connecting players with fashion labels. “Their agents are really good at getting players a Frosted Flakes deal — the typical cereal-box pipeline,” says Smith, who styles players privately on the side. Most of what his NFL clients wear, he says, “We buy”.
The fragrance brand joined a roster of beauty brands jostling for space at Sunday’s game — and across broader sports leagues — to reach new audiences.
Without telling his NFL boss what he was up to, Smith took a week off work last summer to take Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow to Paris Fashion Week. Burrow walked the Vogue World 2025 runway in a backless Peter Do suit. His friend, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Justin Jefferson, sat front row at Amiri that same week. Now, Smith says he’s weighing player requests to attend Tokyo Fashion Week next month.
So what of that Super Bowl red carpet?
“We are expecting a blitz of glitz,” Olivia Culpo, whose husband Christian McCaffrey is a running back for the San Francisco 49ers, told viewers as she co-hosted the show, which streamed on Fox’s Tubi platform and overlapped with Sunday afternoon’s NYFW shows: LaPoint, Meruert Tolegen and Monse.
It was billed as capturing the game’s VIP arrivals, but the cringey show proved the NFL has a distance to go to capture the magic that fashion inspires. There was little fashion to be seen, and very little discussion of the topic. The VIPs mostly had Tubi shows. Actor Joel McHale walked the carpet in jeans and a vintage Journey T-shirt. Nobody bothered to ask Flava Flav what he was wearing. Swift didn’t attend. A couple of Tubi shows’ actors’ wives wore gowns (to a football game), but no one asked about them either. The show needed to hear more from co-host Smith, whose fashion bonafides are real, though he had little to work with there.
A better broadcast would have come from the NFL’s tunnels. Chiefs and Eagles players were the game’s best dressed, arriving via tunnel rather than the red carpet. Many will remember Kelce’s spice-coloured ’70s-esque Amiri ensemble and quarterback Patrick Mahomes in a green plaid custom suit by Stephen Richards Jr, his Nashville tailor.
Adding to the complications of Smith’s job, the NFL owns all content filmed in those tunnels, so fashion brands must get their imagery elsewhere. It’s a risk. David Yurman announced that the Chiefs’s Deandre Hopkins and Juju Smith-Schuster each arrived at the game in the brand’s jewellery, including an array of three chain necklaces on Hopkins. With no photos to share, the brand was left to link to photos of the pieces on the David Yurman website.
The Eagles won the football game, but LVMH won the fashion bowl by dressing its performers. Lamar performed at half-time in Celine jeans. Tiffany put two eye-catching Jean Schlumberger brooches, a diamond bracelet and a ring on Jon Batiste as he sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ before the game. Fox’s broadcast cameras even zoomed in on Batiste’s diamond-heavy hands at the piano keys. Cha-ching.
Correction: Kristin Juszczyk’s line is available at NFLShop.com, not NFL.com as previously reported. (11 February 2025)
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