This week, we take a look at the fashion brands wising up to professional baseball’s growing influence on culture. While basketball remains the sport of choice for most fashion collaborations, the popularity of baseball and its players is growing enough that fashion brands are starting to take notice.
The MLB World Series ended Wednesday night with a victory for the Los Angeles Dodgers over the New York Yankees. But there was another winner this season: fashion brands.
Over the last year, a growing number of fashion brands have cozied up to professional baseball teams and athletes. Brands like Ralph Lauren, Aime Leon Dore, Pacsun and Sporty & Rich, among others, have debuted MLB collaborations with the Dodgers and Yankees and their athletes. The products have ranged from baseball caps to fragrances.
Fashion brands partnering with athletes isn’t a new prospect, but the increased focus on baseball is. Among the popular American professional sports, basketball tends to have the most collaborations with big fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Thom Browne. The players’ tunnel fits and the overlap between basketball, hip-hop and streetwear culture have all meant that the NBA is the dominant sport in fashion. But increasingly, brands are seeing potential in baseball partnerships, even if the sport doesn’t yet have the style credentials that basketball does.
When the Yankees won Game 4 of the World Series on Tuesday, Ralph Lauren was ready the next day with a campaign featuring Yankees player Aaron Judge. Judge is an ambassador for the brand and is the face of its men’s fragrance line, including the Polo 67 Eau de Toilette fragrance.
As part of the campaign, Judge says in a video that he puts on a spritz of Polo 67 before every game. That admission ties into a larger desire among baseball fans to know what players are wearing, leading to the rise of popular websites like What Pros Wear, which catalogs the on- and off-field attire of star players. Popular players like Manny Machado, who plays for the San Diego Padres, have inked deals with fashion brands like Ethika in the last year. And, since 2023, the MLB itself has partnered with brands like Strauss and Gucci. New players like Arizona Diamondbacks rookie Corbin Carroll are often provided with stylists by the league itself, according to an interview Carroll gave to the Associated Press last year.
Pacsun is one of the many brands that collaborated with MLB teams around the World Series. During the series, the brand collaborated with sportswear brand Wild Collective and the MLB on a collection of apparel tied to both teams, with Yankees-themed T-shirts and Dodgers-themed hoodies among the collection.
Abbie Hutzler, divisional merchandise manager at Pacsun, said the company is putting more emphasis on sports partnerships.
“These growing partnerships give apparel brands the opportunity to design and curate exclusive and unique collections for their customers that they can’t find anywhere else,” Hutzler said. “It’s inspiring to see all the different collaborations come to life in the industry and, although they stem from the same teams and leagues, there is so much differentiation, giving all fans the opportunity to purchase something that works for them and their style.”
Baseball players’ looks are often showcased on the growing Instagram account @mlb.fits. With 124,000 followers, the account is much smaller than its NBA counterpart, @leaguefits (1 million followers). Despite basketball’s outsized place in American popular culture, baseball is actually more popular by viewership. The World Series regularly averages nearly 15 million viewers. No NBA final has surpassed that number since 2019, with most NBA finals averaging around 10.5 million viewers.
The Yankees, in particular, have been a favorite for fashion collaborations for years. This year alone, the team has partnered with Supreme, New York or Nowhere, and Billionaire Boys Club. The tradition of popular Yankees-related apparel goes back to at least the 1940s, as a recent post from the Met Costume Institute shows.
Basketball has a deeper connection to fashion through sneaker culture, which originated in part from basketball. But Daniel Kirschner, CEO and co-founder of Greenfly, a media company that gathers and distributes behind-the-scenes content of professional athletes, said that baseball is catching up with basketball.
“Basketball was probably the earliest sport to pursue that connection with fashion,” Kirschner said. “I notice it across all sports now. Today’s pros were raised on social media, following the people they like and noticing what they wear. Athletes across all sports leagues are paying more attention to fashion.”
Greenfly partners with several major sports leagues, including the MLB and the NBA, to collect behind-the-scenes shortform videos, usually shot by the team or league’s staff, and distribute them to players. He said the No. 1 thing that players request across leagues is footage of their pre-game arrival outfits.
“Some players are already using their platforms to express their creativity and style in fashion,” said Garrett James, founder and creative director of the California streetwear brand Ryoko Rain. During the World Series, Ryoko Rain collaborated with @mlb.fits on a baseball T-shirt. After the Dodgers won the series, Ryoko Rain quickly dropped a new version of its most popular product — a pair of mesh shorts — themed around the new champions.
James said that, while baseball players are increasingly drawing attention for their outfits, there are obstacles the sport faces that basketball players don’t have.
“It’s much harder for baseball players, as their season consists of about twice the number of basketball games — and it must be a creative effort with their organization’s social media teams, for example, to provide opportunities that emphasize fashion,” he said.
Joseph Janus, CEO of the Swedish sportswear brand Wesc, agreed, noting that baseball’s influence on culture feels “broader and more integrated into everyday style.” According to Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, professor of fashion history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, this can be seen most clearly with the sport’s greatest gift to fashion culture: the baseball cap.
“The best example that we have, in which we see just how deeply baseball has penetrated culture along the lines of basketball and its jerseys, is with baseball caps,” she said. “It’s due to the game that baseball caps have become a staple feature in menswear, and streetwear. One of the Museum of Modern Art store’s most popular products is their co-branded Yankees-MoMA baseball cap.”
Executive moves
Boohoo Group named a new CEO on Friday morning. While Frasers Group owner Mike Ashley, who has a 27% ownership stake in Boohoo, tried to force himself into the job, he lost out. Instead, the board appointed Dan Finley, currently the CEO of Debenhams, to the role.
As discussed on the Glossy Week in Review podcast this week, resale giant The RealReal ousted short-lived CEO John Koryl in favor of Rati Sahi Levesque. Levesque has been with The RealReal for 13 years and is widely seen as the most qualified candidate to keep the company on its profitable streak.
And former GQ fashion editor Brandon Tan was just appointed to the role of fashion director for both Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. He was hired by the new editor-in-chief for both publications, Willa Bennett, who started in her role in September.
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