How Mariah Keopple is living her dreams in hockey and fashion

It took Mariah Keopple weeks to find the perfect shade of Torrent blue.

The Seattle defender had a very particular look in mind for her game-day outfit ahead of the expansion franchise’s first-ever home opener in November. The colour had to be exact, landing between river and glacier blue (without quite reaching the vibrant, icy hue of the Kraken). The fabric needed to strike the right balance between casual comfort and sophisticated polish. And the design? Well, that was all her own: A fitted corset top with a straight-across neckline, paired with matching wide-leg pants and topped with a hood draped over her long dark hair and loosely fastened below her chin. 

In addition to being a fashion-forward ode to the new PWHL franchise — one of two in the league’s westward expansion ahead of the 2025-26 campaign — the outfit was also a perfect representation of not only Keopple’s style but her skill, as each piece was made entirely with her own two hands. 

In addition to her success on the ice as a third-year PWHL pro, Keopple is also carving out — and sewing up — a burgeoning fashion enterprise. A lifelong creative, she dove head-first into sewing in 2020 and four years later launched her own brand, Riah The Label. She regularly dons her creations on game days, straight out of her imagination and fresh off her sewing machine, her arena tunnel entrances serving up looks worthy of a runway. And just last fall, she debuted her designs on an actual runway with her first fashion show. 

Keopple’s aspirations as an athlete and as a designer might seem at odds with one another, but the reality is quite the opposite. It was hockey that ultimately gave her the platform to fully unleash her creative side. And much like her path to the pros, the 25-year-old’s road to the runway was, she says, “serendipitous” in its timing, the combination launching Keopple into a life she didn’t even know she could dream about. 

“If you were to tell me, freshman year of college, that this is where my life would be, I would never have believed you, ever,” she says.  

The Wisconsinite Keopple was born into a love of both hockey and creative expression. As a kid, when she wasn’t on skates, she was dreaming up craft projects. And art class at school “was when I thrived,” she says, smiling. “It was the best.”

Keopple’s parents encouraged her creative streak, as did her grandmother — Nana set up a little corner at her house, where the youngster spent hours drawing and colouring and crafting her way through whatever she could dream up. 

“She was always teaching me how to knit, how to crochet,” Keopple says of her grandmother. Now, Nana serves up style inspiration, too — it’s no mystery where Keopple gets her fashion sense. 

“She is above-and-beyond fashionable. Like, when she shows up to my games, she’s in, like, the longest, beautiful trench coat with her hats, her gloves,” says Keopple. “Definitely, like, I want to grow up and I want to be her. She definitely kind of fueled that artistic inner part of me.”

Though the arts took a back seat as hockey ramped up in high school, with Keopple eyeing college programs and scholarship offers and eventually settling on Princeton, her urge to create returned when she most needed an outlet, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the cancellation the 2020-21 college season. With hockey on pause, Keopple took a gap year between her sophomore and junior campaigns and rediscovered her creative side. She bought her first sewing machine — a basic Brother model she calls her “tried and true” — and taught herself to sew through trial and error and YouTube tutorials. She started with simple pillowcases, then moved on to tote bags. It didn’t take long for her curiosity about garment sewing to kick in, but when it came to making clothing, she didn’t start simple at all. 

While walking down an aisle of textiles at a thrift store, Keopple fell in love with a set of vintage floral placemats and was immediately inspired to turn them into a corset top. 

“I didn’t realize how difficult that was until, like, I finished it,” she says now, with a laugh. “I was just kind of determined. Now, looking back, I’m glad I started with it because I’ve definitely perfected a lot of the skills doing it. But that was a crazy move by me, for sure.”

Challenging as it was, the project was formative for both the foundation of her garment-sewing skillset, and her entire design identity. Corset tops are a core part of Riah The Label’s offering, and she regularly sources second-hand materials, often repurposing table linens, curtains and other home textiles. “I love using that type of material,” she says. 

Every repurposed piece is an opportunity to tailor-make something all her own, skipping fast-fashion options and instead creating something one-of-a-kind that’s built to last. 

“I was just always sick of, you know, you go on vacation and you go and buy the five shirts that are 20 bucks and they never make it out of the vacation,” she says. “Nothing was what I wanted, quality-wise. I just noticed myself shopping less and less and trying to make more of my clothes. And it’s also just nice because it’s one-of-a-kind, you know other people aren’t going to have it.”

As Keopple delved deeper into sewing and design, the idea of pursuing either professionally wasn’t on her mind as an undergrad. The same went for hockey — with no sustainable professional women’s league in place at the time, she assumed her playing days would come to an end once she graduated from Princeton. That changed as she neared the end of her senior year in 2023 with rumblings of a new league beginning to heat up. 

“I’m so grateful … I graduated and then this league was announced a month later,” she says of the PWHL. “It is truly incredible that we’re all three years into this now.”

Keopple went unselected in the PWHL’s inaugural draft in the fall of 2023, but was extended an invite to Montreal’s training camp and earned a roster spot. It was there, in Montreal, that hockey and fashion really came together for her, starting with the club’s home opener that year. Keopple donned an off-white blazer with matching pants — a set she didn’t sew, but did customize using iron-on patches for an outfit worthy of the occasion. She adorned the front of the jacket with the PWHL logo in Montreal’s colours, and put the game’s date on the back above a black-and-white Canadian flag and the words ‘TEAM MONTREAL’. Dotted down her right pant leg were heat-pressed patches with signatures of her teammates. 

“That was the first outfit that I ever kind of debuted, I guess, in a creative sense,” she says. 

“Everyone just loved it,” she says. “That’s when people kind of were just like, ‘Oh, you made that? That’s crazy!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I also sew!’” The requests started coming in from friends and teammates who wanted their own versions. She designed three for some Ottawa players that year, in addition to some fit-flips — taking a garment from a teammate’s closet that doesn’t get much wear and customizing it into a statement piece they love. Her confidence grew; her style flourished. 

“That’s when I really started getting into making things and then wearing them specifically for games,” she says. 

As she became a mainstay on Montreal’s blue line, her game-day style attracted more and more notice, too. 

“It was always like, ‘What are you gonna wear next?’ and it was a lot of people just commenting, too, like, ‘I can’t wait to see Mariah’s outfit!’ and things like that,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I really need to keep up on this!’ It’s so fun.”

She loved seeing teammates’ reactions and collaborating on ideas with them. “It was really fun to share that creativity with them as well and see how excited they were for it,” she says.

She credits her Montreal teammates in that first PWHL season with encouraging her to take her passion and run with it. That’s who first urged her to post her process on Instagram, and later pushed her to start a brand to show off her game-day designs, leading to the birth of Riah The Label in February 2024. When asks from teammates and friends started coming in faster than she could release designs, Keopple chose to collaborate with Royalty, a sportswear company and PWHL partner, to make branded merchandise like hoodies and hats. That natural-feeling escalation has resulted in a joyful process, one that allows Keopple to show off her own style and see others do the same.

Keopple’s game-day wardrobe is unique — her one-of-kind designs often paired with thrifted ready-to-wear pieces and styled in whatever way speaks to her on any given game-day — but she’s in good company when it comes to PWHL players serving up fashion statements. 

Social media accounts across the league are filled with video montages and photo carousels of players’ arrivals. Keopple makes a point to look at them all.

“Every single game, after a team’s walk-ins are posted, I go and look at everyone’s walk-ins. Like, I just think it’s so cool to see how people take fashion and style and create a version of themselves — like, how are they expressing themselves?” says Keopple, a psychology major whose college thesis was centred around the connection between fashion and personal identity. “I love seeing everyone walking out and doing their own thing, and I love how fans have embraced it, too.”

Fashion and sport, she says, have “really become a huge thing.” She points to the WNBA as leaders in linking the two and praises the PWHL for leaning into it right from the start. 

“Our league has really embraced it from the jump and been, like, full-force in it. I absolutely love it,” she says. 

Developing your personal style, she explains, doesn’t have to mean staying in any single lane. Ask her to define hers, and she struggles to find the words.

“Oh gosh, this is a question I never know how to answer. My game-day outfits can be so different. And I love them all,” she says. 

And that’s the fun of it. “Even just day-to-day I feel like my closet a very [wide] range of things. Sometimes I’ll just wanna wear, like, a street style-type vibe. And then other times it’s just the complete opposite — just super outrageous things,” she says. “I feel like I don’t really have one particular style. But game days are such a good and easy way to showcase so many different styles … On game day, you can do it all. I definitely like to just experiment in lots of different styles and textures and things like that.”

Expression through fashion isn’t just about off-ice style. Keopple sees firsthand how empowering athletes to express themselves through fashion can translate to the game. 

“Look good, feel good, play good — it’s such a thing,” she says. “Obviously, if you’re feeling good about yourself, you’re more confident about yourself, you’re gonna go out there and perform better. … The more confident you are, the better you perform.

“It’s not just sport — it’s work, it’s whatever [someone is doing]. I think if [style is an area] that brings you confidence, I love seeing people really dive into that,” she says. “Because I do think it makes a huge difference, if you’re really passionate about it.”

As Keopple’s own passion for design grew, so did her aspirations in the industry. She gave herself permission to dream bigger and imagine what her pieces might look like modeled on a runway. Last summer, after she signed a one-year deal with Seattle in free agency, Keopple’s agent encouraged her to apply to be part of Fashion in Flight, a Seattle-based fashion show aimed at helping new designers get noticed. During the application process, she shared her vision for her collection and, less than three months before the show was to run, Riah was accepted. 

Her concept was about to become a collection but first she had to actually make it all. And so began her sprint to the runway. Working from Wisconsin, where she spends her off-seasons at home, she got to work designing, drafting and perfecting 12 different looks for the show. Her signature corset took on a central role. Long inseams were a prominent feature. Vintage and vintage-inspired thrifted materials factored in heavily. 

“It was just kind of everything that I personally think of Riah [rolled] into one show. I had some sweatpants in there — I just love the corset-sweatpant vibe,” she says. “What I want the brand to be is what I wanted to portray in the show.”

Her days followed a strict schedule to get everything done in time, all the while training for her first season in Seattle. 

“It was insane. My days were split up literally in half: I would wake up early, I would go to the gym, go skate, do all the training, treatment, all that stuff. Get home, eat, shower. Then the rest of the day was designing and creating all my pieces,” she explains. “I don’t [outsource manufacturing], so I created all of [the pieces] by myself. I was in a grind. It honestly feels like it went by so fast because every single day I was just, like, in the biggest routine ever.”

Three weeks before the show, she moved to Seattle. It was a chaotic time, but one she’d relive in a heartbeat. 

The show, and the entire experience, “was spectacular,” she says, thinking back. “It was amazing. So many of my teammates showed up. It was really cool.”

Now that she’s deep into the hockey season with Seattle, her routine looks a lot different. Hockey is her top priority, and it includes a lot of travel — especially being on the west coast in a league primarily based in the east. But she sews every chance she gets during home stints, setting up a makeshift studio on her large kitchen island. Even road trips involve a little crafting on the go: she’s rarely without a needle and thread, and on a recent flight busied herself hand-beading a corset.

Keopple has big summer plans for Riah. This year, she’s looking to launch the brand’s core collection with the help of a small manufacturer she met with during the PWHL’s Olympic break last month, so her ready-to-wear designs can be made available to more people.

“I would love to hand make every single one of my pieces like I do right now but it’s just not feasible. So, it was really, really exciting [to have this meeting],” she says. 

She also plans to continue styling for teammates. And sewing. Always sewing. 

“I never want to lose the sewing. I love to sew and I love to create, so creating one-off pieces and one-of-a-kind things is still definitely what I want to do and have those available,” she says. “So, kind of piecing all that: ready-to-wear, some artistic vibes, and styling all in one.”

Right now, that means drafting some new corset patterns — like that Torrent-blue design she rocked at the home opener, which was heavily influenced by her runway line and remains one of her favourite looks to date.

“I’m working on a couple of different corset patterns, so I’ve just been trying to pattern those out and make samples of them and kind of see how they’re going, in hopes of wearing those later on in the season,” she says. “It takes a long time to pattern and sample and alter and then sample again.”

She doesn’t currently have plans for another runway show, but knows she wants to do one at some point. In the meantime, there are game-day outfits to plan, her own stage on which to shine as she dreams up what comes next, both on and off the ice. 

“Just having all it in the works is really cool,” she says. “I’m really excited.”