Earlier this month, over the World Cup semi-final between Spain and France, we were in Paris, watching with the locals. From our table, we spotted some of the people around us wearing the colours of Les Bleus, which was a shirt that had been designed by Jacquemus in collaboration with Nike. Unlike in previous years, for this World Cup, it was this smaller designer that worked on the French collection, rather than the likes of the more established Dior or Louis Vuitton. Mostly known for women’s ready-to-wear rather than casualwear, Jacquemus is not the sort of designer you would instinctively expect to find in football.
Its presence there, then, says something about how the space around sport is changing. Although the brand’s partnership with Nike has existed since 2022, this collection was by far its most high profile, and with a split of 70% men and 30% women watching the tournament, it became an opportunity for a growing brand to reach a broader audience.
Similarly, fashion house Loewe partnered with its first ever sports team by signing a four-year deal to dress the Spanish men’s and women’s football teams in May of this year. Having never entered the world of sport before now, the question is, what is it that is currently drawing these types of designers to the space?
“Although the brand’s partnership with Nike has existed since 2022, this collection was by far its most high profile, and with a split of 70% men and 30% women watching the tournament, it became an opportunity for a growing brand to reach a broader audience.”
It’s true that sport and fashion have been circling each other for years. For decades, the major sportswear brands themselves acted as the bridge between performance and fashion, using their athlete rosters, kit contracts, technical authority and rich archives to stretch beyond the field of play. Nike blurred the lines between high fashion and activewear through partnerships with Balmain and Louis Vuitton, Adidas worked with designers including Alexander Wang and later Wales Bonner, while Puma experimented early with fashion-led concepts such as Black Station and collaborations that extended its reach beyond traditional sportswear. Looking even further back, Nike’s partnership with Michael Jordan in the mid-1980s turned a basketball shoe into something much bigger than performance, with the Air Jordan 1 becoming part of sneaker culture, youth identity and fashion. In other words, sport and fashion have never been separate worlds. To this day, these sportswear giants remain the leaders in apparel sponsorship spend.
However, the collaborations now coming through feel slightly different in tone. Adidas’ partnership with Willy Chavarria, for example, is not built around a celebrity athlete or a famous archive shoe, but around a designer with a very specific cultural language. Adidas described the collection as Chavarria’s “bold, culturally rooted tailoring” meeting sportswear, with references to inclusivity, empowerment, cultural representation and identity. Similarly, Wales Bonner’s partnership with Adidas since 2020 has shown how influential the fashion side of this partnership can be, with the designer even putting their spin on the classic Predator football boot, to widespread acclaim.
Away from collaborations, this shift in power balance has led to new names cropping up on the sports circuit.
Axel Arigato, for example, partnered with Jack Draper earlier this year, ahead of Wimbledon and following the end of his contract with Nike. This was the Swedish brand’s first partnership with an athlete and, similarly, it was Draper’s first collaboration with a lifestyle sneaker brand. Named as a creative collaborator, he was brought in as more than an ambassador but as someone who was involved in the design of the product itself. As Axel Arigato isn’t a sports brand, and doesn’t produce sports shoes, this pairing appeared to be similar to the watch deals that is so prevalent in tennis, giving it exposure to a different demographic without needing to position itself as a product worn for sport. It also speaks to a slightly different kind of fashion partnership: one that is still premium, but more attainable than the luxury house tie-ups that have traditionally dominated this space.
The wider eco-system has been central to the move from performance focused to lifestyle focused collaborations in this space. As athletes become more visible through content, short-form video and personality-led formats especially, there is real opportunity for brands to align with more than their sporting prowess. Most obviously franchises like Drive to Survive in F1, Break Point in tennis, and Full Swing in golf have had a direct influence on that increased visibility.
“It also speaks to a slightly different kind of fashion partnership: one that is still premium, but more attainable than the luxury house tie-ups that have traditionally dominated this space.”
Research by Zoomph showed that all nine players featured in Break Point’s first five episodes grew their Twitter and Instagram followings in the three weeks after release despite the furthest any of them reaching in that year’s Australian Open being the fourth round, or – as was the case for three of them – not participating at all. In golf, PGA Tour numbers showed that 63% of Full Swing viewers tuned into the sport in the two months after the show debuted with 11% having not watched PGA Tour coverage in the previous six months. With the “new wave” of younger, more diverse sports fans valuing lifestyle and culture as much as the sport itself, there is clear opportunity for fashion and lifestyle brands that have not historically interacted with sport to step in to that gap.
That is what makes this moment feel different from the sport-fashion crossovers that came before. Athletes are now being watched in more places, across more formats, by audiences who are engaging with personality and culture as much as results. For brands like Axel Arigato and Jacquemus, this is an opportunity to put their stamp on a new space and have a real influence on what sports and lifestyle fashion looks like in the future.
