In planning the NBA’s efforts to start over at the end of July, the league leaders reconsidered almost everything. In a 113 page manual outlining the health and safety protocols obtained by New York Times, the NBA has set the rules for playing poker (masks, throw the packet straight in the trash when finished), ping-pong (absolutely no double) and snorkeling (BYOSnorkel). The league is also rethinking what players are wearing in The Bubble: they will be able to change the name on the back of their shirts to those related to “social justice issues” and, surprisingly, the league’s infamous dress code is getting loosening, according to Athletic reporter Shams Charania.
The new dress code allows players not to wear a sports coat on the bench and to wear short or long-sleeved polo shirts for “team / league business”. These might seem like small changes, but in a league whose influence on men’s clothing has been huge, even small changes can seem massive.
Former NBA commissioner David Stern installed the dress code in 2005 in an attempt to compress the loose clothing then popular among league players. Many rightly called the dress code racist: “They want to get away from the hip-hop generation,” said ex-player Jason Richardson at the time. “One thing for me who was a bit racist was that you can’t wear chains outside of your clothes … you wear a suit, you could still be a cheater.”
While the dress code was intended to professionalize (and depersonalize) the NBA, it had the opposite effect: Stern soon presided over the world’s most fashionable sports league. Suddenly Dwyane Wade was walking down the tunnel walk-in tunnel in clothes so small that they almost went to their knees. Russell Westbrook attacked fashion as did the circle: with the extraordinary power and energy of a fireball who happens to wear colored glasses with a thick frame and shirts with a collar with funky hook prints. And the flu spread far beyond hardwood. Not long after the NBA rules changed, much of the world of men’s clothing purchases also moved away from loose clothing.
In the following years, NBA players have become very influential in the way men dress. There are now entire Instagram accounts dedicated to the chronicle of what NBA players wear. The Houston Rockets – which employ three of the league’s most adventurous dressers – throw a literal red carpet for a walk in the arena that now more closely resembles a fashion show. Dressing well is now so crucial to the game that players like JJ Redick, who entered the league a year after the dress code was instituted, defame younger colleagues “worried about getting a pre-match on Instagram” compared to basketball .
In unraveling parts of the dress code, the NBA is waving a kind of white flag. In 2005, the league was not willing to let the players dress how they wanted. In 2020, the league is following the way fashion has changed over the past 15 years: business-casual dress codes are now the norm in most offices in the United States (several polls will tell you that it’s true for any place 50% to 79% of jobs), and even the famous Goldman Sachs, who let go of his bankers in 2019. Rigid dress codes are even less important in the Orlando bubble, which is already asking players a lot of the NBA who are forced to remain isolated for months potentially. “This is part of the asterisk of the season and there shouldn’t be any rules,” says Kesha McLeod, an NBA stylist who works with players like James Harden and PJ Tucker. “You have [players] here during a pandemic and they are ringing, it should be enough. Now you cannot tell them that they must also wear a sports coat. “
.
