Exclusive: The NFL has a new fashion partner—and it’s your favorite mall retailer

For more than a decade, the NBA tunnel has become a runway, transforming Jayson Tatum and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander into style icons. NFL stars, on the other hand, have been slower to embrace fashion.

But through the NFL’s first official fashion partnership, things might be about to change.

Football players are soon going to get on-demand help in their pregame wardrobes. Today, the NFL announces that it is bringing Abercrombie & Fitch on as its first-ever official fashion partner. It’s a multiyear deal that allows the label to feature the NFL in its branding and open pop-up shops at NFL games. The initiative is bigger than just stores, though.

Starting this season, players will also have access to a Style Concierge, in which in-house stylists from Abercrombie & Fitch will curate looks pulled from the brand’s latest collection, with a focus on denim and fitted bomber jackets. In a new campaign, players we’ll see styled by Abercrombie include Fred Warner of the San Francisco 49ers, Drake Maye of the New England Patriots, and Jake Ferguson of the Dallas Cowboys.

The partnership signals the NFL’s desire to part of the cultural conversation around fashion. And as we’ve seen with the NBA and even moreso with the WNBA, intertwining style and sports can draw more attention to the league and bring in new fans. But it’s also an opportunity for the mall-famous American brand Abercrombie to appeal to male consumers and insert itself among the more fashion-forward labels NFL players have started to wear as in their tunnel walks, like Prada and Rick Owens.

Dressing The Fandom

When Taylor Swift starting dating Travis Kelce in the summer of 2023, the world tuned in to see what she would wear to his games. It was clear she put thought into her looks, picking outfits emblazoned with the Kansas City Chiefs’ logos and colors. She wore an oversized Chiefs jersey as a dress, paired with thigh-high Giuseppe Zanotti boots, or a custom puffer jacket emblazoned with Kelce’s number, 87.

For the NFL, Swift’s sudden appearance at games was an unexpected boon. With the exception of players like the Cincinnati Bengals’ Joe Burrow and the New York Giants’ Tyrod Taylor making waves with their pregame ‘fits, and Kelce’s paparazzi-strewn dates with Swift, NFL isn’t viewed as stylish brand. And so for the last five years, the league has been making a deliberate effort to make itself more stylish says Tracie Rodburg, the NFL’s SVP of global partnerships. It has brought on stylists to dress players, and last year, it even named its first-ever “fashion editor,” Kyle Smith, who is tasked with cultivating looks for stars when they are off the field.

But with Swift, the focus was also on what fans wear on game day. Today, the NFL says that women constitute 47% of its audience. And these female fans are often more style conscious than their male counterparts. They’re trying to put together looks that look cute, but also reveal their support for their team. “Fashion is an important part of the football experience, for fans,” says Rodburg.

Abercrombie, which generated $4.85 billion in revenue last year, has seen firsthand how profitable it can be to create fashion-forward outfits for NFL fans. The brand skews female, and it was eager to attract more male consumers. So, in 2022, it decided to launch a small menswear collection of licensed NFL products, emblazoned with the logos of just a few teams. “When we’re thinking about how our customer spends their time, the NFL owns a big part of the weekend,” says Carey Krug, Abercrombie’s CMO.

(The bar for licensing product is much lower than an official partnership; it simply involves paying the NFL royalties for products made with team logos. And these royalties contribute to the NFL’s revenues, which hit a record $13.8 billion during the last fiscal year.)

Abercrombie’s designers didn’t just slap logos on T-shirts. They thoughtfully incorporated vintage logos on trendy pieces, like cardigans and V-neck sweaters. The products sold out within weeks. So Abercrombie quickly expanded to creating products for women, kids, and even pets, featuring all 32 NFL teams.

Fran Horowitz, Abercrombie’s CEO, said it became clear that the brand had the opportunity to serve women, who are often an afterthought when it comes to NFL merchandise. Now, you can find team logos on some of the brand’s most popular womenswear pieces, like its best-selling bra-free cami and its slightly cropped T-shirts. “We’re uniquely positioned to provide them with more options to represent their team beyond just game day,” she says.

Making The Partnership Official

The popularity of Abercrombie’s NFL line was a signal to both organizations that it was worth partnering. Now Abercrombie is one of roughly 40 official NFL sponsors, that range from Verizon, which has the exclusive rights to mobile live streaming of games, and Applebee’s, a restaurant where many fans watch games. Official sponsors pay royalties to the NFL, but they also stand to benefit financially. Nielsen’s data suggests that fans exposed to NFL sponsors show a 10% increase in purchase intent. Another study, by Turnkey Sports & Entertainment found that 59% of avid NFL fans are more likely to try a sponsor product.

This partnership is an opportunity to redefine the culture around the NFL fandom beyond the stereotype of shirtless fans in stands covered in body paint. And it will go far beyond just NFL-branded clothing. “In some of the campaign imagery to launch this partnership, there are players dressed in outfits that don’t feature NFL logos at all,” says Krug.

To this end, Abercrombie’s Style Concierge is an effort to help elevate players’ style. Players can request these styling services, which will give them access to an on-call Abercrombie stylist, as well as lots of free clothing to wear in tunnels and in other off-field appearances. In return, they may appear in Abercrombie’s marketing campaigns and social media. The brand says that there are many players already on the Style Concierge roster for the season, including Christian McCaffrey of the San Francisco 49ers, Amon-Ra St. Brown of the Detroit Lions, and CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys.

Players styled by Abercrombie will be heavily featured in marketing and social media. If the debut campaign is any indication of what’s to come, this partnership is male-coded. The first images feature players, largely unsmiling, in a wood-paneled bar. They’re wearing jeans or joggers paired with shiny bomber jackets or hoodies. The aesthetic may not appeal to women, who make up the majority of Abercrombie’s customer base and seems like a missed opportunity to reach female fans. More broadly, Abercrombie’s close relationship with the NFL may alienate consumers who don’t see themselves as sports fans.

For Abercrombie, there’s no Super Bowl ring in its future, but the NFL offers an opportunity promote itself as an omnipresent brand on game days, along with a trendsetter seen alongside much higher-end, fashion-forward brands like Kith and Fear of God worn by NFL superstars. Abercrombie has evolved over the past five years, shedding its image as the sexualized, exclusionary teen brand of the ’90s. Instead, it now caters to twenty-somethings, creating basics they can wear to the office and the weekend. While this has been a successful formula for the retailer, Abercrombie hasn’t stood out for being particularly cutting-edge.

But this could change. “Athletes are some of the most important style influencers to our male consumer,” says Krug. “So it’s an incredible opportunity to put them in our clothes.”