Making pastel pop on dark skin: How fashion stylists dress Black NBA players

Abstract

The National Basketball Association is as popular as ever. A league dominated by Black players is in the midst of a fashion renaissance. The purpose of this paper is to explore how fashion stylists dress Black National Basketball Association players. Using a semi-structured interview protocol, the author interviewed 18 fashion stylists to investigate how they service Black National Basketball Association clients. After reviewing the transcripts and going through three rounds of coding, three themes were identified: The Black Body Is Different, It Should Be This Way, and Dress For Yourself And Dress For Others. Using Bourdieu’s cultural intermediary as a conceptual framework, I demonstrate how fashion stylists link the Black National Basketball Association player with high fashion, making National Basketball Association style more a reflection of middle-class ideology than individual clients.

Under the Influence: Marijuana, the Black Male Athlete, and Alternative Understandings of Humanity

“…Related rule changes to regulate Black masculinity include age restrictions in the NBA (Leonard, 2006), the NBA dress code (McDonald & Toglia, 2010;Spearman, 2020), the policing of touchdown celebrations and Black stylistic performances in the NFL (Andrews, 1996b), and the policing of dress and behaviors for Black players in the NHL (Lorenz & Murray, 2014). A more pertinent example of anti-Blackness within the NFL is its former practice of race-norming.…”