Creatives across industries have a soft spot for the sports nostalgia aesthetics — bold colors, quirky typefaces, and grainy texture. Mood board clothing brands shamelessly copy sports candids from the 80s, beauty brands shoot product promo in the style of Y2K basketball and skate reels, and very few hydration and protein brands have been able to resist the urge to throw a poster that looks like a retro magazine ad up on their grid.
If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture though, nothing about Emily is weird. After five years of glossy lips, donut glaze skin, and bushy boy brows, we are up for a resurgence of the bolder nostalgic looks. On social media, alternative fashion, beauty, and lifestyle influences have long started thinning, bleaching, and shaving off their eyebrows to replicate the 90s grunge looks, and for a brief moment in 2021, some of them were even drawing dark undereyes. Like Emily, they are applying skincare and makeup in the middle of busy city streets, on subway trains, and in the middle of nowhere. If early beauty creators turned an intimate ritual into entertainment, the youngest generation of beauty creators turned it into performance art. While the final look matters, so does the act of self-expression that is creating it in public.
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Sports nostalgia from the Sporty & Rich mood board
“Sports represent a moment in time. Whether it’s a world record at the Olympics, a buzzer beater in game seven, or that time Zumba became super popular, it’s a memory we collectively share,” one of Chloe Gordon’s sources explains in a sports nostalgia issue of her design newsletter. “That memory includes the feeling of victory and euphoria, and most importantly for this topic, the design of that moment. Brands can tap into that feeling by referencing design. It feels familiar, even if it’s new.” It’s the perfect representation of the reference board epidemic — a shortcut to cultivating cultural cache without the pressure of risk taking that robs creatives of the opportunity to cultivate their own iconic moments. In sports terms that means admitting defeat before the game even begins.
Ironically, flipping this approach and focusing on replicating the abstract elements of sports nostalgia images, like the stature of the athletes in the 80s and the 90s or the mischievous nature of street sports, may just be the secret to creating visuals and movements that feel both familiar and new. When you see pictures of Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova crashing their opponents in dangly earrings and a jean mini skort, the most interesting part isn’t the maker of the skort or the composition of the shot, it’s the clash of the casual, delicate objects, the powerful presence of the figures wearing them, and the intensity of the events. These photos are more than just memories from a particular tennis match — they are snapshots of the overall state of culture back then.
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Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams serving looks on the court
The only issue with capturing layered stories like this today is that the economics of sports have since shifted in a way that sucked the juice out of them both on the processional and amateur levels. In that same interview with Day One FM, Zito Madu explains how the combination of the pay-to-play dynamic of youth sports, mass sports betting, and focus on profit maximization in major sports leagues have led to the decline in the “variety of play.” Athletes are encouraged to build a monetizable personality online, but rarely show any on the field, striving for points and efficiency. Even amateurs are more likely to break down their diet, gear essentials, and training regiment for their online followers than push the boundaries of their sport or take a shot at creating an entirely new discipline.
To find something worthy, you’ve got to be in the streets. The most memorable stories as of late originate in the quirky subcultures that fly under the radar of the indie publications and culture critics who are busy writing yet another piece about Dimes Squire. It’s endearing for Vibram Fivefingers to sponsor a toe wrestling competition and host a goofy frog-themed retreat while their counterparts at brands, like Puma, are cutting influencer and celebrity checks that materialize in nothing other than wacky fit pics. It’s cool for i-D to run a story about a medieval fighting tournament at the American Dream mall in New Jersey and an interview with an EF cyclist Ben Healy alongside a fashion show recap and a celebrity profile. It’s crazy that Essentia Water is an early corporate sponsor of Jerome Peel of Citybikeboys, and not Vans or Balenciaga. The visuals in this campaign would have topped everything Liquid Death has ever done if it wasn't for the wack copy plastered all over them.
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Citybikeboys for Essentia Water
And then, there are all these rough, edgy characters in the crazy, fast-paced worlds outside of sports and wellness, bursting with wild stories about endurance and excellence — line cooks that spend 10-12 hours on their feet, farmers that tame animals and wrestle heavy weights, but also club rats who stay up dancing through the night and even office interns running around the city in crazy summer heat, fueled by delusion and cold brew. This is where the second coming of the “doing things” culture is meant to shine. Instead of casting a pouty nepo baby to model a sweatshirt that spells the motto in tiny rhinestones, it’d be fun to pay someone with wacky tan lines and sweat stains to live it out in a way that inspires the audience to get up and moving rather than click “buy now” at the checkout.
By now, every fashion and culture magazine has published their own version of the “leggings are dead” piece. WSJ went with a rage-baity angle, quoting Emily Oberg of Sporty & Rich saying “a super fit girl hiding her body under baggy clothes is more appealing than skimpy, tight workout clothes” (to who?) and calling everyone who still wears leggings a boomer. They also chatted with the founder of a cult-followed yoga studio Sky Ting Krissy Jones, who is apparently a tiny tank and big pant kind of girl despite taking partnerships from brands, like Beyond Yoga, who frequently outfit her and her students in free leggings sets. BoF ran a classier version where they shared that despite the boom of legging-forward activewear brands, the leggings sales are, in fact, falling in favor of the baggier silhouettes. “A legging is an item where there could be only so much innovation,” says one for heir sources. “We see this with any trend burnout: For a moment in time, we’re so fascinated with that item and the consumer ends up with 20 pairs in her closet. And then she’s sick of it.”
What’s largely missing from the conversation are the deep culture shifts underlining the rise and budding fall of leggings as a casual everyday uniform. Women didn’t just wake up one day and decide to wear bodycon sportswear to school pickups and grocery stores, it was a product of multi-million dollar decade-long marketing campaigns from brands, like Lululemon and Outdoor Voices, that positioned a matching leggings set as a prerequisite for having your shit together in all areas of life. As one of the BoF sources notes, before pilates princesses and mandatory hot girl walks, it was the norm to wear a giant t-shirt you got for free in college and look bummy during a work out. But once brands started paying young, thin women to wear matching spandex sets, looking put together 24/7 became not only a culture norm but also a monetizable asset.
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Bimba Bose for Adidas and Madonna, Tracy Anderson, and Gwyneth Paltrow post workout
The emotional accounts of why women are gravitating towards heavier fabrics, baggier silhouettes, and messier styling, as told by Liana Satestein, indicate that it’s less about the bodycon fit falling from grace in the circular fashion trend cycle and more about women en mass turning away from what it represents — self-optimization, prescriptive routines, and rapid consumerism. The frills and mesh on the Y2K women’s sportswear pieces were silly and imaginative. “You can tell people were having fun making things,” says one of Liana’s sources. The heavy cotton fabrics were allowed to look worn and deteriorate. Actually, the more worn cotton shirts and pants get, the more valuable they become, unlike spandex that loses its allure as its elasticity declines — a perfect metaphor for how women’s worth fluctuates as their body changes in the public eye. The next viral sportswear silhouette will come from someone who can pick up on these subtle shifts in how women want to feel, rather than look, both on and off the filed and translate them into patterns and designs. The message is more important than the clothes.
This craving for expression and diversity in sports and wellness is the perfect opening for fashion and sports to come together, but so far, they have given us very little outside of luxury activewear and elite athlete sponsorships. On showed lots of potential to own the intersection when it collaborated with Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe (who by the way, is the only real On rep) and brought on FKA Twigs and Zendaya as non-athlete ambassadors at the height of the Challengers craze. Vuori quietly took over your high school classmates’ wardrobes by partnering with Dylan Efron, Tom Holland, and the Gerber family among an extensive roster of footballers, tennis players, and runners. On the opposite side of the field, Dior shot Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappé for the Summer 26’ campaign, Khaite made a custom kit for Venus Williams, and Bottega Veneta invited boxer Imane Khelif to sit front row at their Spring 25’ show after she gold at the Paris Olympic where she found herself in the middle of an international scandal. And yet, none of these perfectly strategic efforts materialized in lasting stories that brought sports and fashion together in a meaningful way.
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Venus Williams in custom Khaite and Zendaya for On
Once again, the business of sports is part of the problem here. Just like Hollywood stars, elite athletes have business teams and stylists who craft their image in a way that leaves no room for the serendipitous fashion moments, like Maria Sharapova carrying her belongings off the court in a grungy metallic leather bag, that Gucci attempted to replicate with Jannik Sinner. At this point, the rules of the game that fashion and sports are playing are perfectly clear: one world creates niche cultural icons and sells them as ambassadors and models to the other, hoping it’d help them develop a Beckham-like well-rounded image and pop star level of appeal. Most of the time though, athletes get siloed because the fashion world is so obsessed with maintaining its own importance, they fail to see the opportunity to create something more interesting and collaborative than another classy photoshoot.
When sportswear brands, like On, try to dabble in culture, and position $100 sneakers as luxury, they can’t help but create funky TV ads and cheesy comedy skits in place of what’s meant to look like Scorsese Chanel ads and YSL’s short films. Adidas is the only brand that’s been able to participate in culture in way that goes beyond flashy marketing campaigns, that by the way, are much more artful than anything produced by other major players in the industry. Their collaborations with Willy Chavarria and Wales Bonner put them right at the center of cultural conversations about identity and expression and built up the momentum beautifully for their Icons campaign starring Samuel L. Jackson.
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Willy Chavarria and Wales Bonner for Adidas
With the amount of high performers in the arts who rep sportswear and sneakers while on the job, it’s surprising to see that no major sportswear brand, besides On, has taken a real shot at positioning their clothes and sneakers as the daily uniform for film crews, sound engineers, PAs, stylists, and all the other big and small people who create culture behind the scenes. There is real interest in the business of arts — podcasts deserting the process of making viral TV shows and indie breakouts, IG accounts documenting the wardrobe choices of cult-followed directors, music producers breaking down pop hits into tracks. In the dirtbag era of doing things, sportswear as a tool for expression and excellence across disciplines is a much more compelling plot line than an alien creation optimized for perfomance in space. The only exception that makes sense is the way FKA Twigs integrates On sneakers into her perfectly freaky alien universe.
FINAL CHAPTER COMING 8/31 !
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