These days, it takes more than a winning mentality and elite athleticism to make an athlete—no matter the sport—a star. You need both of those things (and probably a championship ring or two), but a presence off the court, track, or field can be just as important for an athlete who wants to go bigger and build a brand beyond their sport. If they want to sit front-row during Paris Fashion Week, walk the red carpet at the Met Gala, or attend major movie premieres, the secret is possessing a great sense of style. Fans want to understand who their favorite athletes are beyond what they see on a broadcast—what their hobbies are, their beauty routines, and how they dress to pump themselves up before a game. The latter has become a huge part of professional sports, with NBA, WNBA, and NFL tunnels, as well as F1 paddocks, all transforming into makeshift runways. Suddenly, athletes have an opportunity to become style icons as well as sports legends, and in many cases, stylists are the unsung heroes responsible for setting the stage.
In F1, Lewis Hamilton is the GOAT both on the track and off it. Fellow driver Alex Albon told Who What Wear ahead of the 2025 season that he felt the seven-time World Drivers’ Champion “is just as [big as], if not bigger than, the sport,” and he wasn’t wrong. He’s checked all the above boxes, even going as far as to cochair the Met Gala and design collections for multiple luxury brands. How? In part, by working with stylists, like Eric McNeal, with whom he began collaborating in 2022, to introduce fashion to the world of motorsport. Courtney Mays and Brittany Hampton have done similar work in the WNBA, working with the New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart and the Dallas Wings’ Paige Bueckers, respectively. The league is booming in every respect, with the tunnel becoming a huge media draw game after game. (Trust me, I was on-site at the 2025 WNBA All-Star game, along with about 150 other journalists trying to get videos of Stewart, Bueckers, and more stylish players in the W as they entered Gainbridge Fieldhouse clad in designer outfits.) In addition to their on-court skills, they’ve become household names across the cultural landscape, and the work of their stylists to help them get there cannot be forgotten.
The WNBA and F1 aren’t the only sports getting the fashion treatment. Keep scrolling to meet the creatives shaping style in every sport, from the NFL to the Premier League.
(Image credit: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic/Getty Images; Sam Bloxham/LAT Images)
Eric McNeal
Long before Eric McNeal joined forces with Lewis Hamilton in 2022, the creative worked with cool people responsible for shaping culture, whether through fashion, music, or other genres. In 2017, for example, McNeal styled Solange Knowles for Saturday Night Live. The following four years saw him collaborate numerous times with Pyer Moss designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, as well as Brother Vellies, the shoe brand beloved by fashion people that was founded by Aurora James, the creator of the Fifteen Percent Pledge. In 2022, when Hamilton graced the cover of Vanity Fair alongside a 1981 Lamborghini clad in Versace, it was McNeal who styled him. They’ve seemingly been working together ever since, creating looks for the F1 paddock as well as the red carpet and more magazine covers. When Hamilton announced he was leaving Mercedes and joining Scuderia Ferrari, the duo put together one of the most iconic motorsport shoots of all time in Maranello, home of the Italian team’s headquarters. They worked side by side for Hamilton’s meaningful ensemble at the 2025 Met Gala, which celebrated the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. The driver cochaired the event with A$AP Rocky, Colman Domingo, and Pharrell Williams. With the 2026 F1 season just getting underway, and Hamilton’s team seeming to have gotten the latest set of regulation changes just right, an exciting (and very stylish) few months await in the paddock, all of which will be brought to us by McNeal, half of arguably the most powerful and innovative stylist-athlete partnership in sports history.
(Image credit: Juan Ocampo/NBAE via Getty Images; Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Daily Front Row)
Brittany Hampton
Brittany Hampton didn’t start her fashion career styling but instead was a designer from a young age. “I’ve been designing since I was a kid,” the San Francisco native said on The Who What Wear Podcast last July. “My chores weren’t regular chores. I didn’t get to wash dishes. I didn’t pull out the vacuum cleaner. My grandmother was always like, ‘Pick needles out of the carpet.'” By the time high school came around, she was making prom dresses for her classmates, using MySpace to showcase her work. “It kind of went viral,” she recalled. It wasn’t until she moved to L.A. that she put designing aside, working backstage at runway shows in the beginning, and later venturing into the world of styling. From 2019 to 2023, she worked with NBA superstar and Honor the Gift designer Russell Westbrook to put together his in-season tunnel ‘fits. This work caught the attention of Paige Bueckers’s agent, Lindsay Colas, who tapped Hampton to style her client, then playing basketball in the NCAA at the University of Connecticut, for a StockX campaign. The rest was history. Bueckers, who went on to become the number one pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft and the Dallas Wings’ All-Star guard, and Hampton have been collaborators ever since, putting together some of the league’s most memorable ensembles. She now also works with other WNBA players, including Sabrina Ionescu and Cameron Brink.
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Olivier Rogers
The NBA has long been an environment where being well-dressed and smooth on the basketball court has rewarded you with cultural notoriety. This combination of style and skill is just now becoming normalized in other leagues, but in the NBA, it’s been present, with players going back to Wilt Chamberlain in the 1950s expressing themselves through fashion. The modern-day “tunnel fashion” phenomenon really started, though, following the 2005–06 season, when then–NBA Commissioner David Stern instituted a league-wide dress code across the league, resulting in backlash by players. In the aftermath, personal style erupted in the NBA, paving the way for today’s tunnels across the country to be filled with well-dressed athletes, from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to Russell Westbrook. One such dresser is Tyrese Haliburton, point guard for the Indiana Pacers and a frequent wearer of sought-after sartorial goods. Since he was drafted back in 2020, he’s collaborated with stylist and designer Olivier Rogers, whose namesake brand has been spotted on the likes of A$AP Rocky, Kyrie Irving, and Playboi Carti. During the Pacers’ heroic run to Game 7 of the NBA Finals in 2025, when his team faced up against GQ’s Most Stylish Man of 2022, Gilgeous-Alexander, Haliburton made a name for himself, not only on the court as one of the most clutch players in the league but also as one of the best dressed. The man responsible for the looks that brought about that rise? Rogers. “I want him to be the NBA player that, when people see him, they don’t think [of the] NBA,” he told GQ during last year’s Finals. Little to no logos, cool IYKYK brands, and a proper look guide his work with the 25-year-old, who, despite rupturing his Achilles in Game 7, remains one of the league’s most-watched dressers. Let’s just say that the sidelines have never been so fitted.
(Image credit: Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images; Logan Bowles/Getty Images)
Kyle Smith
Kyle Smith is making history every day. How? He’s the NFL’s first fashion editor, a role that will likely show up in every professional sports league over the next decade. Smith, like many of the names on this list, didn’t start working with a career in sports on the agenda. Instead, he got his start as a freelance stylist, working with acclaimed celebrity stylist (and budding sports stylist—in 2025, she teamed up with WNBA player Kelsey Plum to curate tunnel ‘fits for the L.A. Sparks guard) Karla Welch. According to an interview with The Washington Post, Smith scored a part-time job dressing on-camera NFL commentators in 2019, a role that later inspired him to start documenting players’ tunnel ‘fits on Instagram. Ian Trombetta, a senior vice president of marketing at the NFL, saw the account and something clicked. Soon, a first-of-its-kind position was being drawn up for Smith. Today, that job consists of many things, including curating ensembles for Joe Burrow, quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals and one of the most prominent names in modern football, as well as helping steer the style of other players in the league in the right direction. As a result, Smith is transforming the NFL into one of the most stylish leagues in sports.
(Image credit: Jed Cullen/Dave Benett/Getty Images for British GQ; Richard Bord/Getty Images)
Algen Hamilton
The days of David Beckham being the only footballer in the Premier League wearing designer outfits to matches and on red carpets are long over. These days, fashion and European football go hand in hand, with Arsenal leading the way in brand partnerships, and players from Chelsea, Manchester City, Crystal Palace, Newcastle United, and more all putting together ensembles as impressive as their footwork. One designer and stylist from South London, Algen Hamilton, is responsible for dressing some of those exact athletes, including Trevoh Chalobah (Crystal Palace), whom Hamilton’s been working with since 2021, and Joe Willock (Newcastle United), the midfielder who made his runway debut during Paris Fashion Week in August 2025. According to an interview with The Athletic, players weren’t dressing up nearly as much as they do now when he got his start styling in the Premier League. “Also, brands weren’t really opening up partnerships to football players either,” he said. “As time has gone by, the popularity has grown, and supporters are tapping into the player outside of the training ground and off the pitch.” As a result, he believes that players opened up more to the idea of expressing themselves through fashion, ushering in a new style era for the sport.
(Image credit: Joy Malone/Getty Images; Taylor Hill/Getty Images)
Dex Robinson
Dex Robinson is the ultimate cross-discipline stylist, working with a range of athletes, including the star quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, Jalen Hurts, and Mikal Bridges from the New York Knicks. The former’s style has become especially noteworthy in the last few NFL seasons, with the Eagles winning the Super Bowl in 2025 and Hurts’ style choices in the postseason garnering praise in the sports world and beyond it. Robinson’s client list also includes Jaylen Brown from the Boston Celtics and DK Metcalf, a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers. If all that weren’t enough to juggle, he also cofounded a luxury menswear brand with Tyrod Taylor, a quarterback for the New York Jets, in 2023 called Diallo. Taylor is often referred to as one of the best dressed players in the NFL, and as one of the foremost stylists working with athletes in the league, the duo’s partnership makes perfect sense.
(Image credit: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Range Rover; James Devaney/GC Images)
Carlotta Constant
When it comes to fashion in Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is the blueprint, but his influence has catalyzed a wave of increasingly stylish drivers in the paddock, from Zhou Guanyu to Pierre Gasly. Another is Hamilton’s Scuderia Ferrari teammate, Charles Leclerc, who, in recent years, began working with stylist Carlotta Constant for brand campaigns, red carpet events, and more. Constant—who is London-based but spends time in Monaco, where Leclerc and a handful of other F1 drivers reside—also frequently collaborates with the driver’s fiancée, Alexandra Saint Mleux, styling her in archival vintage for grand prix in Shanghai and Monza. Mleux is one of the most talked about WAGs in sport right now, with her sophisticated and meticulously curated race-weekend outfits being among the main reasons for her growing popularity. To call the pairing a power couple would be an understatement, and their mutual work with Constant only makes their appearances together more impactful.
(Image credit: Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for American Ballet Theatre (ABT))
Courtney Mays
When the big three of the 2024 WNBA Championship–winning New York Liberty were invited to attend the Met Gala last May, there was really only one person to call to help put together their looks for fashion’s biggest night: Courtney Mays. The longtime NBA and WNBA stylist—who works with players like Chris Paul and Breanna Stewart, as well as Tina Charles, Karl-Anthony Towns, Sue Bird, and Megan Rapinoe—took on the entire group, including Stewart and her teammates Jonquel Jones and Sabrina Ionescu, as well as the Liberty’s owner, Clara Wu Tsai, collaborating with designer Sergio Hudson to create personalized ensembles for each guest. Mays brings that same enthusiasm for storytelling and attention to detail to all her clients, whether they’re in the spotlight on a red carpet or in the tunnel before tip-off. Her work with Stewart and Bird, in particular, has made Mays one of the most respected and notable stylists in the entire WNBA landscape, a space that’s experiencing a rise in popularity unlike any other in its almost 30-year history. There is no WNBA tunnel without Mays, and now that she’s collaborating with some of the league’s youngest and brightest talents, like Sonia Citron, we’ll get to see a whole new generation of players dressed by the stylist from Cleveland.