afraid to make mistakes, to air ball shots, or miss back-to-back free throws. The same mindset can apply to style, I suggested to Antetokounmpo over the phone this week: The best-dressed people in the world are fearless, not worried about wearing the wrong thing the wrong way. Antetokounmpo agreed. “The way I dress is I try to live in the moment as much as possible,” he said. “I feel like I want to wear this hoodie, this T-shirt, this short or whatever it might be and sometimes it turns out well. Sometimes it turns out where people are like, ‘What are those!?’ but I just live in the moment.”

The hoodie of his current moment is the result of a collaboration between Antetokounmpo, the messaging app WhatsApp—for whom he is the first global ambassador—and the fashion brand Post-Imperial from Nigerian-American designer Niyi Okuboyejo. Both Antetokounmpo, with friends and family around the world, and Okuboyejo, who needs to reach his network of artisans abroad, attest to relying on WhatsApp. Antetokounmpo’s green tie-dye hoodie with Nigeria’s country code across the chest and his family name Adetokunbo on the back, which he wore before Sunday’s All-Star game, is a sartorial announcement of this new union.

The reversible hoodie has stories to tell, if you’re willing to look closely enough. The two shades of green that create the marbled tie-dye effect on the hoodie’s chenille side represent the Nigerian flag and WhatsApp’s limier hue. Okuboyejo said he was inspired by a dyeing process called Adire that’s traditional in southwestern Nigeria. “Adire dyeing is a form of storytelling for Nigerians,” he explained. Turning the hoodie inside out reveals a side made of silk and covered in squiggly lines. These too are imbued with secret symbolism. The sequences of stripes come in bunches of two then three then four, representing the Nigerian international phone code. Okuboyejo compares the patterned interior to the silk lining on the suits of NBA draftees, which are often embellished with numbers, college insignias, high school mascots, or even breast-cancer awareness ribbons.