Now more than ever, professional athletes are the game-changers for luxury brands.
While red carpet photos have kept the public hungry for celebrity style for years, there’s a new canvas for fashion: the professional sports athlete. Sports players are the ultimate influencers today, with PwC projecting sports marketing sponsorships to grow to a massive $109.1 billion by 2030. A professional athlete’s influence goes far beyond their games and matches.
For example, Portuguese professional soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo is the most followed person on Instagram, with over 620 million followers. Argentine professional soccer player Lionel Messi is the second most followed on Instagram, with more than 500 million followers. And now that media is more multifaceted, professional athletes can showcase personality and style beyond the sports arena, and luxury brands are leveraging the exposure to create impactful relationships with athletic stars.
Professional athletes promote everything from cars to video games, but fashion partnerships are some of the newest and most coveted collaborations. Kim Kardashian’s brand SKIMS launched a menswear line and featured athletes like Brazilian soccer player Neymar Jr. and NBA player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The campaign was followed up with a multiyear deal as the official underwear partner of the NBA. The move hopes to see crossover between a predominantly female-bought brand and the NBA—whose viewership is 70% male—and vice versa. SKIMS is also the official underwear sponsor of the WNBA.
BOSS, once seen as a suiting brand only, is successfully experimenting with using female athletes to bolster its brand in mediums ranging from motorsports to golf and even debuted an equestrian line for fall/winter 2023. Alica Schmidt, a German track-and-field star with 5 million Instagram followers, is a BOSS athlete. She competes in BOSS performance wear, attends the brand’s events, and even walks in runway shows, helping the brand reach female audiences. According to the brand, womenswear is currently outpacing other categories.
Left: Gucci ambassador Jannik Sinner at the U.S. Open (Photo by Antoine Courvecelle) Right: Kim Kardashian at the announcement of SKIMS being named the official underwear partner of the NBA, THE WNBA, and USA Basketball (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage for SKIMS)
Speaking to Business of Fashion in its case study titled “Fashion’s New Rules For Sports Marketing” by Daniel-Yaw Miller, Jacqueline Windsor, the head of retail at PwC U.K., says a modern brand is defined by authenticity and experiences. “Sports really help brands to play with these intangible levers,” Windsor explains. “The newness and continually fresh storylines that come with sports help to generate excitement, while athletes help brands reach communities they may not previously have accessed through traditional fashion channels.”
Brands are also in it for the long haul, offering multimillion-dollar, multiyear contracts for athletes to be associated with them. Tennis player Jannik Sinner has a long-term Gucci deal worth millions, and tennis player Naomi Osaka entered one with Louis Vuitton in 2021, which was rumored to be a seven-figure deal.
While brands and athletes are keen to work with each other on larger scales, there are other opportunities for collaboration. A more organic, on-the-ground marketing style is found in the tunnel walk, which has become a hotbed for capturing well-dressed athletes like the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and WNBA player Dearica Hamby. These pathways connecting locker rooms to arena or stadium entrances are a crucial part of athletic culture, where players get to show off personal style and shape their public image while promoting the luxury brands they love or have partnerships with.
Krista Roser, a Nashville-based stylist who has worked with players like former Tennessee Titan Taylor Lewan, says that the pandemic supercharged the public interest in player fashion, adding fuel to the fashion fire and lifting brands at a time when traditional mediums like red carpets and events were inactive. Players leaned into it, too. “Athletes are creative, fashionable people who have to wear uniforms to work. This gives them a chance to show their personality away from the team,” says Roser.
All games are opportunities for players to project their public image and for brands to get exposure, amplifying their cachet and allowing customers to have a reference point when shopping. There’s also an opportunity for a brand to diversify the types of looks seen in public, namely streetwear. “Brands can be more versatile and show the scope of their designs,” Roser explains. She adds that an extra benefit is the immediacy—the shopper can buy something they saw on an athlete the week before. “Customers can get that instant gratification,” she says. And it directly impacts revenue.
Left: Washington Wizards’ Kyle Kuzma arrives at the arena with a limited edition Audemars Piguet timepiece (Photo by Kent Smith/NBAE via Getty Images) Center: Naomi Osaka in Louis Vuitton at the 2021 Met Gala “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” (Photo by Taylor Hill/WireImage) Right: Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics arrives with a Gucci Savoy duffle bag customized with his initials and fluorescent details (Photo by Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty)
Khalilah Beavers, a stylist who works with former NBA player Carmelo Anthony and has worked with former NBA players J.R. Smith and Brandon Bass, among many others, agrees that sports players were a mostly untapped market previously but are now getting their due. “Athletes are the new models. Fans can see athletes in a different light through their fashion. It adds another layer they weren’t privy to before when it was just them on the court. Players are an important part of celebrity culture now, and fashion is paying attention.”
The importance of the relationship between athlete and luxury house can perhaps be seen most strikingly in Kering’s August 2023 $7 billion stake in Creative Artists Agency, giving brands like Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent access to CAA-represented athletes like NBA player Kyle Kuzma and women’s hockey player Aerin Frankel.
