Fashion makes many of sport’s attributes ‘legible,’ says Roxy Nucu of 160over90. Together, they can compound favorable audience sentiment.
Ralph Lauren designed the official opening and closing ceremony kits for Team USA at the Winter Olympics 2026 in Milano-Cortina (Ralph Lauren/Youtube)
Fashion and sports have long been connected, but right now, their intertwined reach and cultural power are elevating both.
With Global Fashion Month currently lighting up the cultural calendar, the spotlight has once again fallen on fashion’s role in building cult status. This is built through a clear point of view, repetition, and shared symbols. Fashion is one of the few systems in culture that can deliver all three at once – and sports is one of the few spaces where this is starting to click.
What we’re seeing isn’t simply fashion entering sport. It’s that sport and fashion now trade cultural value. Sport borrows fashion’s shorthand for aspiration and cult-building, while fashion borrows sport’s scale and emotional gravity: mass attention, communal rituals, and public stages. This is making the rise of fashion brands sponsoring sports properties – from Louis Vuitton and F1 to Tommy Hilfiger and Liverpool FC – entirely unsurprising.
Beyond the pitch
Fashion leads with a clear point of view. When collaborating with Nike, brings its distinctive worldview based on intimacy and French romance. Meanwhile, luxury fashion brand Wales Bonner employs its familiar cultural sources and diasporic identity when working with Adidas. These partnerships foster a language that’s tangible through design choices people recognize instinctively. We’ve moved from IYKYK to YKIWYSI (you know it when you see it). In sport, this is powerful: for example, Ralph Lauren’s bespoke Team USA kit for the Winter Olympics 2026 gave a good example of how consistent visual codes make identity clear and instantly visible.
Sport has always functioned like a belief system. Colors, rituals, rivals, and loyalty are inherited rather than chosen. You don’t support a team because it’s logical; you support it because it’s yours. Fashion doesn’t compete with that devotion. It gives it more layers, more places to live.
By translating sporting codes into visual language, silhouettes, styling, and attitude, fashion moves fandom beyond the pitch and into everyday life. What was once contained to match day becomes repeatable, wearable, and visible. The game stays the center of gravity, but fashion is how belief circulates and takes root across culture.
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Recognizable worlds
Upcoming global events, from the FIFA World Cup 2026 to the Olympic Games in LA in 2028, will only further amplify this crossover. The jersey alone is no longer enough. Fans want more ways to signal belonging, ways that feel fluent, not forced. Tunnel walks, arrivals, press moments, travel days, and off-duty fits now carry cultural weight because they extend fandom into daily identity. This isn’t merch. It’s signaling. Fashion stretches sport from something you watch into something you inhabit.
We see this acutely in women’s sport: the WNBA tunnel is intentional. Players including Angel Reese, A’ja Wilson, and Paige Bueckers use style to build coherent, recognizable worlds around themselves. Fashion becomes voice: a way to express power, softness, politics, and defiance without explanation.
The same logic plays out again and again. When designer Rhuigi Villaseñor reworked Italian soccer team Como 1907 as a global lifestyle brand, he didn’t dilute the club; he decoded it, translating heritage into distinctive style and identity, without breaking trust. The players in this year’s FIFA World Cup will be afforded an incredible platform to bring their own style, attitude, and visual cues to a global audience once the tournament kicks off.
Multiplying meaning
Paris 2024 showed how Olympic meaning now compounds through fashion, amplified by LVMH’s visible role, while the Winter Games in Milano Cortina took it further by making fashion live during the Games themselves, hosting the first-ever Olympic runway show in Milan.
And Stateside, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance landed harder because he rejected spectacle for symbolism, wearing a custom Zara outfit and his own Adidas sneakers to center identity and accessibility over luxury.
In these cases, fashion multiplied the meaning, made it legible at a glance, and allowed it to move freely across physical and digital life. Belief didn’t get louder because it shouted harder. It got louder because it learned how to show up everywhere.
If you want a cult following, stop chasing moments and start building meaning. Fashion shows that cult status is created through repetition, codes, and symbols that compound over time, not constant novelty. Sport proves how those belief systems scale, turning identity into shared ritual and daily practice.
The brands and athletes winning aren’t louder or more spectacular; they’re more consistent, translating who they are into wearable, recognizable systems people choose to live in.
The takeaway is simple: design symbols people want to repeat and commit to an aesthetic long enough for it to mean something.