Forget runways, NBA players use game-day tunnels to strut latest styles and score new fans

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When Ian Pierno started @LeagueFits, an Instagram account chronicling NBA player fashion, in 2018, he struggled to find photos to post each day.

It seems impossible now, says the 27-year-old, considering how much tunnel style – the de facto red-carpet runway of players walking in and out of the locker room before and after games showing off their looks – has come to dominate the increasingly overlapping worlds of fashion and sport. And its influence is quickly spreading.

“Other leagues are definitely seeing how big of a moment it can be,” says Pierno from his office in Brooklyn. Today @LeagueFits has more than one million followers.

The fashion world, too, has taken notice of NBA players’ pioneering of tunnel style. This month LeBron James was unveiled as the face of Louis Vuitton’s spring/summer collection. Last year, former Miami Heat shooting guard Dwyane Wade starred in a Versace eyewear campaign, while Toronto-born Oklahoma City Thunder player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander walked the runway for Thom Browne at Paris Fashion Week in 2022.

The rise of tunnel style is fuelled by Gen Z, who are more interested in connecting with players than teams or leagues, compared with other generations. Showing off their personal style helps players get that younger demographic’s attention, and doing so is lucrative business for both leagues and fashion brands, especially luxury brands eager to attract Gen Z as customers, says Livia Zufferli, partner, consulting, customer and marketing at Deloitte Canada.

“They’re trying all to pick up different segments of growth and new sources of revenue. And the more youth-oriented demographic is where they want to start growing and grow that cohort into some of their top shoppers,” she says.

Revenue among the world’s 100 top luxury goods companies reached US$347-billion globally in 2022, according to Deloitte’s most recent Global Powers of Luxury Goods report.

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The NBA is leading the leagues, having partnered with Louis Vuitton to create several capsule collections since 2020, as well as Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand Skims last year, among other examples. It’s also always had a scattering of fashion-forward outliers, from Wilt Chamberlain to Dennis Rodman.

But the league’s dress-code era was long-lasting and hard to shake. Support for players’ self-expression through fashion has only been relatively recent. When a brawl broke out between players and spilled over into the stands in 2004 – the infamous “Malice at the Palace” – the league was suddenly terrified about its image among the NBA’s mostly white viewership. In an attempt to reform that image, the commissioner at the time, David Stern, made the NBA the second major league to have a dress code, behind the NHL.

Requiring players to wear “business casual attire” to games, the code seemed intent on banning players from dressing like Allen Iverson, who at the time was the NBA’s most influential style icon: no more baggy, sagging pants, no more exposed chains, no more durags. Many accused the code of being racist, but it was still stringently enforced.

From then on, players arrived to games in boxy suits and boring ties – looks seemingly chosen to be intentionally bland and controversy-free. But by 2012, a shift was underway. Wade made headlines for arriving to a game in bright pink pants paired with a crisp white shirt. Still within dress code, he broke the mould.

That same year, Russell Westbrook, another early pioneer of tunnel style and arguably the boldest dresser in NBA history who once said he uses fashion as a psychological weapon against other players, sat down at a postgame press conference in a cartoon-patterned Prada shirt and bright red glasses sans lenses.

A bold new era was born, even if it was slow to develop outside a small group of player influencers.

When Adam Silver took over as NBA commissioner in 2014, enforcement of the code became much more lenient, if not totally lax, given that players’ looks by then were more reflective of high fashion than the hip-hop culture of the late nineties and early 2000s the league was so intent on distancing itself from.

The watershed moment came in 2018. LeBron James and his teammates on the Cleveland Cavaliers wore custom-fitted Thom Browne short suits to the NBA Finals (adding to his panache, James carried an alligator version of the Mr. Thom bag). Browne is celebrated as a modernizing force in men’s wear and a three-time winner of the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s men’s wear designer of the year award.

Ever since, players have been competing with their tunnel looks as much as they have with their play on the court.

It’s no coincidence that the timeline for the rise of tunnel style tracks almost perfectly with the coming of age of Gen Z. An older generation of traditionalists might think that what players are wearing in the tunnel is an irrelevant sideshow. For many Gen Z-ers, it’s the main attraction.

Nor is it a coincidence that the NBA is catering to their interests in fashion. The league has the highest proportion of younger viewers of any major sports league – 27 per cent of viewers are under 35, according to Nielsen. That puts it ahead of the NHL, with 23 per cent, and the NFL, with 21 per cent. Baseball ranks fourth, with only 16 per cent of viewers under 35.

Basketball has a rich culture of sneaker aficionados and streetwear devotees, a natural fit with Gen Z’s interest in fashion and self-expression, says Brandon Brown, a professor of sports management at New York University.

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“There’s so many people that are not even interested in a lick of basketball, like will not watch the game, but follow my page just because they want to see what the players are wearing,” says Chad Brown, who runs @NBAFashionFits, an Instagram account with more than 270,000 followers.

But this could be the gateway to more traditional fandom, including watching games and purchasing merchandise, so if tunnel style draws them to the game, then tunnel style they shall get. Other leagues are starting to take note, and no wonder.

“Every sport … should be looking at this and saying, ‘Okay, here’s our demographic today, where’s our demographic going? What are their motivations for watching us? What are their motivations for following us? How can I get them to buy more merchandise? How can I get them to share more content?’ ” says Laurel Walzak, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who specializes in global sports media.

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The NFL has been rapidly embracing tunnel style, regularly posting player looks on the league-operated NFL Style Instagram page and the “Behind the Fit” video series where players and stylists are interviewed about their attire.

Last year, the MLB paired players with stylists for a red-carpet event during All-Star Week, a clear sign of the NBA’s and Gen Z’s influence. (Toronto Blue Jays slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr., rocking a yellow and blue textured suit, paired with white T-shirt and chain, picked himself as the best dressed in an interview with MLB.com).

“MLB knows they are lacking in that younger audience,” Brown of NYU says.

The NHL, which has a dress code requiring players to wear suits and ties, is sure to be next.

Players want it – a 2019-2020 National Hockey League Players Association poll found 73 per cent of players would be in favour of relaxing the game-day dress code – and the league could no doubt benefit from it.

Megan Wilson, a Toronto-born sports stylist and consultant who has worked with many NBA players, doesn’t see this trend going anywhere any time soon. “They’ll do whatever is good for the bottom line,” she says of the various leagues.

Ultimately, Wilson says, tunnel style has caused a sea change in the world of fashion. “Athletes are the new models.”