Jan Hits The Fan

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but could you talk a little bit about the pro athlete tradition of game day suits? It seems especially important in hockey, and I'm wondering if there's any sort of interesting history there. Cheers, I really enjoy your blog.

I very much enjoyed this question, as reading up on it let me pull a bunch of things together and find new connecting threads. And I realized I really needed to clarify something I’ve said before.

Today’s object lesson will be modeled by William Karlsson. Thank you, Bill.

Technically, they wear ‘em cause they have to.

The CBA is the basic labor standards worked out between the NHL and the Player’s Association (NHLPA).The NHLPA is a professional labor union that negotiates working conditions for players: this includes not just the much-squabbled-over salary cap but issues like equipment regulations, safe transport, and the right to control the use of their own images in marketing.

I’m not a total fan of the current NHLPA because they tend to forget who they’re really for

(Note: Performative disdain for athletes’ salaries is not interesting.)

 Few athletes make the money stars make and there are a lot of costs of living when you routinely get smashed in the face and have to move cities, but every player wants to think one day they’ll be making that maximum, so they always vote it up and then the PA tends to get lost in that rather than protections for the majority of players. So the current NHLPA is often inconvenient and entirely dull

–but it’s still an important inconvenience for other reasons.

It matters to have labor protections. 

Absolutely not all the teams are like that. Some are great. I love my teams. But the fact being great is voluntary for them is not good.

It matters to control the use of your own images. 

PK Subban can appear on any magazine wearing what the hell ever he likes, and he can refuse, too.

NHL ’19 is gonna sell a lot of copies and he got to say, ‘yeah I’m cool with looking like that on the cover.’

I mean it’s not real good but nobody looks good on ‘chel. Being the ‘chel cover model is kind of praise and humiliation kink at the same time

But if they’d proposed some fucked up caricature, Subban could have said nah. (Subban is in fact known for his creative control over his own brand: he came up with the storyboard for his viral Winter Wonderland video and the concept for his orange creative-anachronism Winter Classic suit as well as 100+ over bespoke suits for specific appearances. All his intellectual property goes through the management group he created, run by his sister.) That’s a Black man deciding how to represent himself as a Black face of hockey.

Unions, with the right priorities, matter.

Side Note: Do you know your NHLPA Rep?

Congratulations, Caps fans: it’s a Tom!

Yeah, Tom Wilson is on the Executive Board, meaning he was elected by his teammates to negotiate for their interests. I think his qualifications are “honestly enjoys math” and Student Government and I love it. 

Okay, focus. So why does the union care about suits?

Suits have been included in the CBA since at least 1995. That’s quite a bit older than the NFL and NBA, which added a dress code in 2005.  

This is interesting because until recent years hockey was kind of known as the smoking trashpile low-class sport. You famously couldn’t see the ice a lot of the time, much less what the players were wearing. So my best guess is the 1995 dress code was added as part of the NHL’s push to class themselves up, although it might just date back to a time when everybody wore suits.

The thing is that NHL players haven’t argued about it. And that’s actually weird.

Hockey players are weird compared to other athletes, mostly because minor league hockey is fucking weird. Many current NHL players grew up in the billet system: at 12 or 14 or 16 they moved across the continent or across continents to live out of strangers’ basements and the backs of charter buses.

That is not something other athletes really go through. They learn how to be an adult person from their families and communities. Hockey players learn from a bunch of sweaty 14 year-old boys.

And minor hockey leagues require kids to wear game day suits. It’s fundamentally bonkers, and a significant expense for most families which among other expenses pushes a lot of kids to quit when they hit their growth spurts and have to constantly buy new gear

it does give back riches in pictures when the boys in your family were all gangly and inclined to Jewfros and broke your tooth with a stick at age nine

but it kind of makes sense why it’s done and why kids accept it: it takes a bunch of goofy-lookin kids from all over and makes them look like they fit together for a common purpose.

By 18, they all own that one investment suit that many of them had to save up for and just expect to wear it every other day. (An odd and often sad wrinkle comes up at the NHL Draft, which last two days is a row: every kid owns one suit, but some of them who aren’t sure if they’ll be taken in the first or second round try to find a second suit and shirt from a family member, friend, or just another kid who’s already been drafted so they don’t have to face the embarrassment of showing up the next day in the same clothes.)

The fact you asked this question is really interesting because, I mean, in my head hockey players are fuckin dull. They do not dress good.

But that’s absolutely started changing over the last…maybe just five years.

I have heard younger guys starting to talk about their suits, and what they always do is take some shit about how dull hockey suits are and laugh and then say that yeah, they’ve been trying harder, because…they watch the NBA Draft.

A lot of the current generation of young NHLers are really big basketballs fans.

If you’re strictly a hockey fan: the NBA and specifically the NBA Draft get international high-fashion coverage.

There are Best and Worst Dressed lists on every major site and in fashion magazines. Designers watch and attend, and NBA players themselves have created their own lines and model for fashion houses. Several players’ children have gone into professional modeling.

Current trends like adding decorative lining to a classic suit jacket, both the super-skinny suit and the resurgence of ‘30s and ‘40s lines, loafers, and the use of reds and pinks are partly or mostly popularized by NBA players.

This is a direct and glorious reaction to the NBA dress code, or more accurately the NBA ban-on-everything. Like I mentioned, the NBA instituted it’s code in just 2005. And it was…hwoo boy.

A selection of items NBA players are not allowed to wear while traveling, before and after games, or while giving interviews:

Oh, and Commissioner Stern thinks hip-hop is “offensive and antisocial,” if you’re wondering.

Players most objected to the ban on chains. The in/out of clothes clause is meant to cover the NBA’s ass on religious symbols while targeting the wrist- and neck- chains that many Black athletes wear as a symbol of the iron chains of slavery being recast in gold success.

There’s an amazing tendency for people to call chains “tacky” because they’re a symbol of new money worn people rising out of the lower class, and a tendency for white people to not seek out or discuss the meaning of the symbol. Different people wear or don’t wear them for their own reasons, but yes, they are a symbol with an accepted broad meaning, like a/other spiritual symbols.

So the players responded by absolutely tearing into the concept of a suit. Black men had been using color and form and all that before (this sentence sounds clipped just because the alternative is endless). But the NBA was kind of a new setting, where these men are told that they have to wear suits, but the suit has nothing to do with their actual business.

In the office, there are practical factors in how people decide to dress, where it effects how people see them and their ability to get their work done. But an NBA star will play exactly as well whether he wore a suit with the legs cut off to make shorts or not that night. People can think he looks like a vain, self-centered, eye-searing tasteless goofball and it does not affect his success, and he knows that.

So over the last decade NBA players have tried everything. Some looks have been (fun) flops and some have soared. And the first to pick those up are usually other athletes in the NFL and now NHL looking for tips for their own required-but-not-quite-work wear.

There is some…filtering.

A

De’aaron Fox in a jacket lined with breast cancer signs in honor of his mother, a breast cancer survivor, and his aunt. Malik Monk’s lining reads ‘The Woodz’  in homage to his hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas.

William Karlsson in the NHLest take on the look. The lining refers to Franchise Loyalty rather than something unique he “holds close to his heart,” and it’s plaid.

Note for the lost: The history of plaid hockey suits is hockey players like plaid. It’s just what it is. One time Giroux wore a full three-piece plaid suit, and now a lot of them sneak in tasteful plaids which would be pretty fine on their own except I’m pretty sure they all think it’s a clever allusion (Evgeny)

B

This question was really good because I want to clarify my (much tested, thanks @charliemacavoyjr) Position On Socks.

Some of you may recall the words “salty fermenting patent leather,” I believe. 

But:

D’Angelo Russel can wear shoes without socks all he goddamn wants, and he does not need my approval, but I will love it every time.

I feel different when I look at this outfit. And that’s because the outfit is stone-cold brilliantly designed to communicate something that makes me feel different.

The cuffs and lack of socks are working to draw your eye down to highlight the shoes. The perfect color-match and the very issue of wear on the shoe that’s so aggravating to me when other guys do it are intentionally the point. He’s continuing the fashion tradition of Black men asserting that they’ve risen over economic struggle by showing now they can own shoes to wear just once.  

I grew up to be obsessed with making do, and it’s interesting. My sister and I used to make our own ‘boots’ out layers of fabric and things. I’m fine, now, I  do own multiple shoes, actually, and can wear them just because they’re pretty, but I still fight my brain over whether I really need boots every winter, when after all I could just wear used sneakers and three sock layers.

 I am not quite capable of this kind of triumphant gesture. But when I see young men of color and men from lower class backgrounds do it, something in me feels like hell yeah, I get it, and it’s pretty fuckin brilliant. 

When I see white and specifically North American young men largely born in middle class suburban families do it, it doesn’t feel like a statement in the context of class struggle and triumph. It just looks like they don’t know how to do laundry. Like they saw and didn’t get the point.

Because the shoes aren’t the point of that outfit. They’re vaguely-probably-fine patent loafers, in brown. His high cuffs and bare ankle are supposed to draw your eye, but they aren’t serving any purpose, because there’s nothing there to pay attention to. 

This is a shoe worth tricking my eye down to:

This is not:

THIS IS:

Also this

These aren’t loafers they’re just hot

I may sometimes daydream about those boots let’s move on

So that makes it just look like a gimmick, not a design.

It’s a reaction, not an absolute moral position. I don’t think it’s a shock that the two white NHLers whose taste strikes to me as the best creatively now are both guys I know grew up poor, but I don’t know if that reflects an external reality or if my knowing that internally effects how I feel about what they do.

It’s fine if a guy looks at what other guys are doing without being sure how or why it’s working and tries to do something similar and kinda whiffs it. I will make fun, but it’s fine.

But I really want to clear up that I’m never, ever gonna get mad at guys, especially black guys, trying a new weird idea that’s designed to say something.

In conclusion: I love that the young Black men in the NBA have so totally broken and taken over the modern men’s fashion game. 

Other young men of all ethnic backgrounds looking to them and remembering to credit them is pretty ideal.

And adaptation is good: I’m glad that white and light-skinned NHLers stick pretty close to their grays and blues and mostly go for a small piece in a deep tones or light tones for a full suit when they add color, because that works for them.

I reserve the right to make fun of them for it and for copying each other (the fact that about 300 of all the guys in the NHL go to the same tailor probably does not help) and for dressing in desaturated picnic blankets, but I love it and them anyway.

This is worth everything: