Fly
The Big Book of Basketball Fashion
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
Equal parts photo-rich lookbook, and cultural commentary, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion is the story of the extraordinary intersection of high fashion and basketball, from the league's inception to today, and celebrates the iconic style of NBA athletes.
Each chapter explores the style of an era and the cultural influences that shaped it: The league’s inception in 1949, pre-Civil Rights Movement, when the NBA was mostly comprised of white players who wore suits and skinny ties. The years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the birth of funk and R&B when basketball fashion got flashier (think Walt “Clyde” Frazier and Wilt Chamberlain wearing fur coats and big hats). The Michael Jordan era of the 1980s and 1990s, with its oversize suits. The epic Iverson/Hip-Hop years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. And now to today, a time defined not only by social media and high fashion’s birthing of the tunnel walk (think LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Russell Westbrook), but one in which athletes are idealized as style icons and activists, figures who inspire conversations beyond how they play and what they wear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Jackson (Survival Math) captures how NBA players have styled themselves over the decades in a visually appealing survey that sometimes falls short on substance. From 1946 to the present, Jackson spotlights hoopers whose style made waves, including "self-proclaimed hippie" Bill Walton's shaggy hairstyle in the 1970s; Michael Jordan's "capacious bespoke suits," a look that seeped into mainstream fashion in the 1980s and '90s; and Allen Iverson's hip-hop–influenced diamond jewelry, "baggy jeans, and in-your-face body ink," which stirred up public furor about the NBA's "respectability" and in 2005 compelled commissioner David Stern to establish a "business casual" dress code at league events. Despite the book's wealth of striking photos, Jackson misses a few opportunities, as when he gives short shrift to the way social justice issues and such movements as Black Lives Matter have shaped NBA fashion, and lets exultant descriptive writing ("envision Julius Erving swaggering outside the Nassau Coliseum in a cream-colored shirt and bell-bottom pants, the tint of Dr. J's oversize sunglasses matching the burgundy of his leather lace-up shoes, the gold of his Casio wristwatch reflecting the tone of his pinkie ring") overtake the stated goal of proving how "the story of clothing, fashion, and style in basketball over the past seventy-five years is also... the story of America." It's an eye-catching compendium that could have been more.