15 Times Designers Took Football off the Field and Onto the Runway
Super Bowl Sunday is two days away: What are you going to wear? Aside from a jersey, probably not something that could have come out of the teams’ locker rooms. A soccer player’s kit—shirt, shorts, socks—is infinitely easier to iterate on than an American footballer’s gear. In fashion speak, helmet is a homophone for Helmut—as in Newton or Lang. And shoulder pads, well, for me they conjure thoughts of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, not the Miami Dolphins. Once in the early 1990s, I was stopped on the street by a man who was indignant about my strong-shouldered Montana suit. “You look like a linebacker!” he growled. With the 1980s trending, today the same comment might be taken as a compliment.
From boyhood, Thom Browne has played a family football game every Thanksgiving, a tradition he brought with him from Pennsylvania to New York City. In 2019 the sports-loving designer created a football-themed capsule, but he’s referenced the game more than once on the runway (and can probably lay claim to creating the first ever mitered-stripe football). Other designers, including Alexander Wang, have lifted the ball’s lacing detail and applied it to their work to evoke a game-day feeling. The intent of this collection of American-football-themed runway looks is to do the same. Game on!
Photo: Marcio Madeira1/15Alexander McQueen spring 2005 ready-to-wear
Photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com2/15Thom Browne spring 2020 menswear
