Basketball has always been the most fashionable sport—after all, Michael Jordan helped launch the sneaker revolution. But the advent of the pre-game tunnel camera in the last five years, and the
imperative it creates to look good, has taken things to another level, says the Brooklyn Nets player and noted dandy James Harden. “When you look back in the NBA, stars used to dress,” he mused in an interview last week. “But I feel like now, the emphasis [is on] fashion, to where we got runways in our tunnels. There’s cameras flashing—it’s like a show.”
“You gotta put it on,” Harden continued. “You gotta put that outfit on when you walk into that game because there are going to be a lot of pictures taken of you. And then they’re going to be posted on social media. So if you want to be talked about, in a good way—or a bad way! Depends on what you got on,” you have to be into fashion, he said. “It’s kind of the culture, and it’s a beautiful thing.”
Fashion tends to take more than it gives, though, even (or especially) when it comes to its biggest advocates. Designers, editors, and stylists kept rappers at an icy arm’s length for decades, for example, and it’s unclear whether basketball’s influence on style is quite understood by the industry outside of sportswear companies.
Harden wants to change that, which is why he announced in June that he was joining the board of Saks Fifth Avenue. “My job is to bring my piece of the pie and take it to a whole other level,” he said. “The partnership with Saks, my position is to help Saks move the culture and let the world know that we’re not the previous Saks that everybody’s familiar with. We’re more innovative. We’re outside. We’re here to put a stamp on the fashion world.”
“For me, it was just an opportunity of a lifetime, honestly,” he added. “You know, I don’t know another athlete or just another person in my position that would have that opportunity.”
Harden is right that he is one of the few players powerful and stylish enough to actually shift that relationship. He was an early star of the tunnel fits era. “I’ve been into fashion for a very, very long time,” he said, adding that he loves “the creativity, the different mindset. I feel like I’m in that world in a sense of creativity.”
He has no favorite brands—he is simply and gloriously a clotheshorse. He calls designers “artists.” He wears Balenciaga’s hits and rarities with equal aplomb, and loves prints, unusual fabrics, and weird shapes. He has never regretted a single outfit. “I think I’ve worn something that I was like, later, ‘What the hell was that?’ [But] most of the time I’m confident,” he said. “I’m just very, very strange in the sense that I can wear anything and be confident. Most of the people in the rooms that I walk in, they’re like, What the hell is he wearing? But inside I’m normal, feeling like I’m wearing something everyone else has on.”
I asked Harden whether fashion is giving NBA players as much as they are giving the industry. The relationship isn’t quite yet what it should be, he conceded. “For me, to be on the board at Saks, my job is to bridge that gap. You’ve had players that go to fashion week and people that wear clothes or what not. But to make it cool, make it to where you get some of these younger guys that dress nicely and [are] into fashion an opportunity to tap into the fashion world at a higher level—I feel like I’m the person that’s going to pave the way for that, bridging the gap and shining more of a light on Saks and the things that we’re capable of. Not just in the fashion world, but in the community as well.”