Last week, the N.B.A. was rocked by a surprise retirement announcement — though no one actually left the league.
Kyle Kuzma, 29, a forward for the Washington Wizards whose outlandish outfits have occasionally overshadowed his on-court skills, told Vogue that he would no longer wear a distinct outfit for his team’s 82 regular season games. Instead, he plans to wear a variation of a banal gray sweatsuit for each tunnel walk into the arena.
“I don’t want to be a part of that type of community where you have to put on a fit,” Mr. Kuzma told Vogue.
For the N.B.A. fashion world, this is the equivalent of Michael Jordan retiring midcareer to try his hand at baseball. From spiky sweatsuits, to crochet cardigans, to mob-wife furs, Mr. Kuzma had left no trend unturned in his first seven years in the league, setting a new bar for camp. To a game in 2021, he wore a bubble gum pink Raf Simons knit with elephant-trunk sleeves. That look was so notorious that the Wizards made a bobblehead of Mr. Kuzma wearing it. Last year, he pulled off a Rick Owens puffer with an attached snood, as if a sickly black worm was munching on his face.
And so, if Mr. Kuzma is leaving the tunnel fit game behind, he’s exiting a chaotic, “please look at me!” world that he helped create.
“He was the guy who got things rolling in terms of the tunnel of becoming an internet thing,” said Ian Pierno, who runs @leaguefits, an Instagram offshoot of Slam magazine.
Mr. Kuzma is a good player for a bad team — a contrast from his time as a role player for the Los Angeles Lakers when they won a championship in 2020 — but his proclivity for provocative dressing had proved that even less prominent athletes could get attention simply with audacious clothes.
“You don’t have to be a star player to get like 15,000 likes and a cult following,” said Mr. Pierno.
By the time Mr. Kuzma entered the league in 2017, the N.B.A.’s fashion awakening was underway. Game days saw LeBron James arriving in Thom Browne’s shrunken blazers, Russell Westbrook in dog-bit flannels and Chris Paul in Saran-Wrap tight double-breasted suits.
Mr. Kuzma turned things up. In snake-printed leather sets and Magritte-esque mirrored suits, he tipped off an avant-garde arms race across the league. In an already competitive sport, players have become obsessed with out-dressing each other.
“It is a competition,” said Mr. Pierno. Like a fit therapist, Mr. Pierno has occasionally heard directly from players who are stressed not about their free-throw percentages, but if their clothes are spicy enough to get noticed.
“Some players will go extra extreme,” added Chad Brown, 36, a New Yorker who runs the popular Instagram account @nbafashionfits, which tracks (you guessed it) what N.B.A. players wear. “You can kind of see like the next versions of the Kuzmas coming up.”
Mr. Kuzma, for his part, acknowledged his role in all this. “I can speak from experience that when you’re a younger player, you don’t want to wear the same thing twice,” he told Vogue. “Now we’re just buying clothes to impress people or to stand out. It’s ludicrous.”
His competitors don’t seem to agree. The opening days of this season brought out a parade of outrageous outfits: Jordan Clarkson, a guard for the Utah Jazz, in double-wide pants that looked stolen from David Byrne; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a superstar for the Oklahoma City Thunder, in an all-leather outfit, with a suggestive flap apron that tipped into S&M territory. Even Mr. James, who has nothing left to prove, showed up in an off-the-runway “you can’t have this” Louis Vuitton double-breasted jacket. That Mr. James has appeared in Louis Vuitton ads did not seem to be a coincidence.
“The bigger brands are trying to just tap into this market in any kind of way they can,” said Mr. Brown, who speculated that fashion companies send starters clothes. At the very least, brands now make runway designs in extended sizes to accommodate player’s herculean frames.
So far this season, as players scramble to find something that their teammates have never seen before, they’re shopping more from barely-off-the-ground brands and farming eBay for vintage.
Into the first week of play, Darius Garland, a guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers, wore a marshmallowy double-zip bomber from the Korean label Thug Club, and Cameron Payne, a guard for the New York Knicks, wore nearly $1,700 motorcycle jeans from the Los Angeles upstart Warren Lotas. Not familiar with those brands? Well then you probably haven’t been spending enough time farming through Instagram for hand-patched sweatshirts. Players, said Mr. Pierno, “are more online than they’ve ever been.”
Mr. Pierno is most energized by a roster of young players who plumb the internet for forgotten gear. “It’s shifted from having these crazy high-fashion pieces that are so rare to scouring the deepest depths of eBay to find the FUBU N.B.A. collab from the ’90s,” he said.
Mr. Pierno called out Tre Mann, a 23-year-old reserve on the Charlotte Hornets, who has been pulling off a very pre-Y2K mélange of pendulous jean shorts, throwback jerseys and headbands. Allen Iverson would be proud.
As for Mr. Kuzma, he traveled to an away game over the weekend in a massive tan shearling jacket and a cashmere Loro Piana ball cap. Perhaps, instead of swearing off trends altogether, he was just embracing last year’s big one: quiet luxury.
Look for the rest of the league to catch on next season.
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