They walk the cement floor of the tunnel ubiquitous to arenas around the country — making a statement before the action even starts.
As the Warriors arrive at Oracle Arena for a recent playoff game, photographers are ready for the moment. More than just capturing the anticipation, their images of the stars’ entrances are regularly used to highlight menswear trends for publications such as Esquire, GQ and HypeBeast, an online fashion site.
“The tunnel is the new runway,” says Vick Michel, stylist for Warriors forward Draymond Green. “People pay attention to what a Draymond, or a LeBron (James) wear.”
Eyes are on everything from players’ sneakers to their preferred brand of headphones. Green has described the experience not only as a perfect social-media moment, but also as a “stage” for personal style akin to major fashion weeks. And no stage is bigger for these celebrity athletes than the NBA Finals, which begin Thursday in Toronto.
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Throughout their run of three championships in the last four seasons, the Warriors have become cultural icons. Fans devour details about their lives outside of basketball, from the players’ exact peanut butter and jelly preferences to where they’re moving with the team’s relocation to San Francisco next season. They make headlines for their shoe-collecting habits, awards-show outfits and watches accessorized with championship rings.
They’ve risen to the top of their sport playing a beautiful brand of basketball — with the attire to match, whether it’s elevated streetwear or dapper, bold suiting. As they’ve reigned over the NBA, basketball has perhaps become the sport of fashion kings.
Fashion peacocking has a long tradition in basketball, from Walt “Clyde” Frazier’s superfly fur coats in his 1970s heyday with the New York Knicks to the abundance of excess that was Dennis Rodman on the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s. But it seems to have peaked in recent years.
If last year’s Finals were any indication, what a player wears before the game can get as much attention as their performance on the court. James famously wore a school-boy-inspired shorts suit before Game 1 and also outfitted his teammates in suits by the same designer, Thom Browne. The next game, Green sported custom Richfresh shorts, which both designer and player say was not a clapback at James.
For fashion brands, the promotion from having a major NBA star wearing your clothes can be priceless, says stylist Kesha McLeod, who has worked with the Warriors’ Andre Iguodala and currently dresses the Rockets’ James Harden and PJ Tucker.
“Just think about LeBron James in that Thom Browne shorts suit last year,” McLeod says. “That’s a piece that’s signature for Thom Browne that now everyone outside of fashion knows about. It’s a piece that went viral because LeBron wore it.”
The reverse can also be true, says McLeod: A player with the right kind of image is a much more attractive candidate for sponsorship opportunities.
“Players don’t show up looking tacky because they want a good endorsement deal,” she says.
In recent years, the walk down the tunnel has been transformed into a media event, similar to how the awards-show red carpet became a spectacle for entertainment programming and big fashion business in the 1990s. Live streams of the players’ entrances are now common and images of their outfits flood photo-sharing apps like Instagram, with brands frequently tagged.
McLeod attributes some of the wider fan interest in players’ personal style to how clothing choices can make athletes relatable.
“It says, these guys, they get dressed for work, they care what they wear on the job like everyone else,” says McLeod.
McLeod and fashion designer Fresh, of label Richfresh, point to James, who is now with the Los Angeles Lakers, and Thunder star Russell Westbrook as players pivotal to elevating style in the 21st century.
“You can’t even say NBA and fashion together without crediting Westbrook,” says Fresh. “He made you stop and pay attention to ballplayers as fashion people.”
With his cropped jeans and deconstructed designer T-shirts, Westbrook started a wave of fashion consciousness later joined by players like James and the Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade. Allen Iverson’s flouting of the 2005 business-casual NBA dress code (mostly no longer enforced) marked a shift where players’ personal tastes and later, personal branding, began to take the spotlight off the court, McLeod says. This was when designers began to see that NBA fashion was expanding beyond the usual sneaker deals, and that these tall, slim-framed players were “perfect fashion billboards,” says Michel, Green’s stylist.
The other transforming force was undoubtedly social media, agree McLeod, Fresh and Michel, specifically Instagram.
“Social media plays a huge part in how they present themselves, like fashion,” says McLeod. “It gives them a bigger stage to show themselves, especially for future partnerships.” She points to Iguodala, her former client, as a player who used both his social-media presence and his hype-elegant fashion identity to create other opportunities outside of basketball.
“The athletes are brands themselves, as much as the designer,” says Fresh. “They are aware of that power, both in the messages of how they dress and how they present it on social media.”
What the players have planned fashion-wise for this year’s championship is a mystery, but fans have reason to hope for the best: the postseason tends to be when players pull out the stops in their wardrobe choices and cause those viral moments. But the culture of league, and of personal branding, now is such that players are almost always conscious of how they present themselves.
“Even though a suit is no longer a dress-code requirement NBA, players are taking what they wear seriously,” says McLeod. “But whether it’s a Dries Van Noten silk shorts set or a beautiful sweatsuit, it’s about being who you are. That’s what the fans want to see.”
Tony Bravo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tbravo@sfchronicle.com
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