Fashion’s own Heated Rivalry is ramping up. On Tuesday night, the show’s star Connor Storrie (who plays ice hockey star Ilya Rozanov) sat front row for Saint Laurent Men’s Fall/Winter 2026 show, wearing a beige suit and mustard shirt. It follows Hudson Williams (who plays Storrie’s enemy-turned-lover Shane Hollander) walking the ski slope runway at DSquared2 last Friday in Milan, sporting a distressed denim jacket and snow boots (and crashing the brand’s website). Luxury fashion brands are locked in a talent face-off, mirroring the TV show’s own fierce rinkmanship.
The explosively popular drama, adapted from Rachel Reid’s 2019 gay romance novel, follows two stick-wielding enemies as they compete against one another in the rink and hook up on the sly. It’s racked up 600 million minutes of viewing in the US alone — but that figure, recorded last week by The New York Times, has likely already been eclipsed, as the show continues to boom across Europe, following its late European release on January 10. Fans are hosting Heated Rivalry raves on campuses, magnetizing swathes of frenzied college students obsessed with the show. And while the show’s hockey players and teams are fictional, its success could have real-world implications for fashion crossovers in sport.
Poaching Williams was a masterstroke of pop cultural timing from DSquared2’s Dean and Dan Caten (who emerged for the finale in DSquared2 hockey jerseys). “It’s a cameo that worked for so many reasons,” says GQ style editor Mahalia Chang. “DSquared2 is a Canadian brand — Heated Rivalry and Williams are Canadian, too — it was winter themed, and Milan, where they held the show, is just about to host the Winter Olympics where ice hockey is going to be a huge feature. I think Dan and Dean were right on the money.”
Dishin — a Buffalo-based streetwear label founded by Matthew Keeler, who protyped the viral Air Jordan 1 Chicago hockey skates — has collaborated with National Hockey League (NHL) teams including the Chicago Blackhawks, the Detroit Red Wings and the Buffalo Sabres on custom apparel. Elsewhere, Drake’s Ovo and Lululemon have collaborated with the NHL. “Hockey is having a moment, because the visual appearance is so strong and the game is inherently cinematic in all aspects,” Keeler says.
Ice hockey’s tepid style history
This fashion potential may seem incongruous to those into the sport; ice hockey has never been seen as a trendy world. “Fashion didn’t exactly ‘orbit’ hockey, I would say it existed in a separate galaxy. Hockey has always been the silent sport in fashion,” says Keeler. This was partially driven by the rigid dress codes of the NHL. “For nearly a century, hockey has had a mandatory suit and tie dress code that dominated the arrival aesthetic and the NHL remained anchored in a traditionalist team-first mentality that often limited creative expression among its players,” he explains. “If you actually follow hockey, you know that real hockey players have boring style at best, awful style at worst,” Chang adds.
This is reflected in the Heated Rivalry wardrobe, which, especially in the case of normcore enthusiast Shane Hollander (played by Williams), isn’t exactly enviable. “There’s a certain blankness to the style of a lot of professional hockey players. What we see in the show is a lot of press conference suits, athleticwear and hoodies. I wanted it to feel real,” says the show’s costume designer Hanna Puley. No wonder Hollander hires a stylist in the fifth episode, desperate to impress (and probably feeling threatened after Storrie’s character Rozanov rocked a leopard print Jean Paul Gaultier FW98 shirt in the episode before).
But the lack of style is shifting. This season, for the first time, the NHL has ditched the suits and ties, ushering in an era of the so-called tunnel style that’s dominated the NBA for years and become a lucrative fashion marketing moment in its own right. Keeler now runs an Instagram page called @PreGameSty, which analyzes the ‘sty’ (that’s hockey slang for style) of players when they’re off-rink. Toronto Maple Leafs talisman Auston Matthews, Keeler says, is the GOAT, “mixing custom tailoring with avante garde-style streetwear into his wardrobe”. Jock looks aside, there are a few gems on the Instagram page: double-denim Acne, Oakley wraparounds, and an Arc’Teryx beanie.
Instagram content
There’s potential, but ice hockey ‘sty’ is still esoteric. The sport itself, after all, is still relatively niche (the NHL on ESPN averages 660,000 viewers compared to 18.7 million viewers for the NFL). This, though, opens up an IYKYK opportunity and a way to continue fashion’s dalliance with sport, without trying to sponge off the saturated opportunities in soccer, F1 and tennis. Meanwhile, hype around the sport itself is on the brink of a major moment. NHL revenue hit a record $6.2 billion last season, with projections for $6.8 billion by the end of the 2026 season, ending in April. Rinkside appearances from Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg and Taylor Swift are only adding to the global buzz, and NHL players will appear in the Winter Olympics next month for the first time since 2014.
A cold aesthetic
For designers, the ice rink offers a distinctive visual language. It chimes with the “cool blue” trend predicted by Pinterest for 2026, and stands in tandem with the rise of luxury ski content. But the setting also creates a sense of theater, as typified by Soeren Le Schmidt’s 2024 runway show on ice in Copenhagen. “The ice itself became a metaphor,” Le Schmidt says. “It introduced fragility, unpredictability and a certain vulnerability that you cannot choreograph away. Movement slowed, balance became visible, and suddenly the body — not just the garment — was the center of attention.” It’s why fashion is also flirting with figure skating: in January, Canada’s Deanna Stellato-Dudek debuted a costume by Oscar de la Renta, while skaters like Ilia Malinin and Alysa Liu have also courted considerable attention.
But ice hockey, unlike figure skating, has an established hero product and thrift shop classic up its sleeve: the jersey. “Maybe it flew under the radar [due to Williams], but there were hockey jerseys in the DSquared2 show, too. And we’ve seen a couple of elsewhere — in the Bode x Nike collab, for example — which is great,” GQ’s Chang says. “[A hockey jersey] is a really great versatile piece: long sleeves, boxy, breathable, with some good designs out there.” Heated Rivalry fans are already getting thrifty. “I’ve seen some people [create] DIY jersey-inspired latex mini dresses already, and that’s a great place to start,” Puley notes.
But it’s not just the jerseys that are proving enticing. “The visual language of padding, lacing, oversized knits and armor somehow sits naturally alongside the non-sportswear pieces,” says Dan Flower, former managing director of The Face and founder of sports-style magazine Practice, citing The Face ice hockey editorial he worked on. “In a world of ‘clean-fit’ fatigue, hockey offers something that’s textured and rough,” says Keeler.
It’s this juxtaposition that makes ice hockey’s energy so intriguing, a tension between ballet and battle. “I think we’re living in a time where contrasts are incredibly compelling,” says Le Schmidt. “Figure skating and ice hockey embody that duality: grace and power, discipline and emotion, beauty and brutality. That tension feels very contemporary. It mirrors how many of us navigate the world today — balancing softness with resilience.”
For now, the adoption of ice hockey by fashion might be a case of wearing soccer scarves without knowing anything about the team. “I wonder if we’ll see elements of the hockey aesthetic subverted and claimed by people who don’t connect to hockey culture, but connect to the values exhibited in [Heated Rivalry],” says Puley. Case in point, perhaps, is creator Isaac Hindin-Miller asking guests on the Dior Homme front row to name a single ice hockey team, drawing a round of blanks.
For now, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov remain the stellar names of hockey for the fashion-forward. But more players are getting stuck into creative collaborations. “The future is hyper-personalization. I love working personally with players and inspiring their artistic passions away from the rink,” Keeler says. Maybe, in the future, real ice hockey stars will hit the runways, galvanized by free dress codes and cashing in on the cultural currency of shows like Heated Rivalry. “Suddenly, a century of pent-up creative energy [has been] unleashed,” Keeler says, emphasizing the significance of the NHL ditching suits and ties. “We aren’t just catching up to other sports, we’re bringing a grit-meets-glamor approach that’s entirely our own.”
