Fashion Briefing: The World Series spotlights fashion’s baseball opportunity

Over the last year, a growing number of fashion brands have cozied up to professional baseball teams and athletes. Brands like Ralph Lauren, Aime Leon Dore, Pacsun and Sporty & Rich, among others, have debuted MLB collaborations with the Dodgers and Yankees and their athletes. The products have ranged from baseball caps to fragrances.

Fashion brands partnering with athletes isn’t a new prospect, but the increased focus on baseball is. Among the popular American professional sports, basketball tends to have the most collaborations with big fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Thom Browne. The players’ tunnel fits and the overlap between basketball, hip-hop and streetwear culture have all meant that the NBA is the dominant sport in fashion. But increasingly, brands are seeing potential in baseball partnerships, even if the sport doesn’t yet have the style credentials that basketball does.

When the Yankees won Game 4 of the World Series on Tuesday, Ralph Lauren was ready the next day with a campaign featuring Yankees player Aaron Judge. Judge is an ambassador for the brand and is the face of its men’s fragrance line, including the Polo 67 Eau de Toilette fragrance.

As part of the campaign, Judge says in a video that he puts on a spritz of Polo 67 before every game. That admission ties into a larger desire among baseball fans to know what players are wearing, leading to the rise of popular websites like What Pros Wear, which catalogs the on- and off-field attire of star players. Popular players like Manny Machado, who plays for the San Diego Padres, have inked deals with fashion brands like Ethika in the last year. And, since 2023, the MLB itself has partnered with brands like Strauss and Gucci. New players like Arizona Diamondbacks rookie Corbin Carroll are often provided with stylists by the league itself, according to an interview Carroll gave to the Associated Press last year.

Pacsun is one of the many brands that collaborated with MLB teams around the World Series. During the series, the brand collaborated with sportswear brand Wild Collective and the MLB on a collection of apparel tied to both teams, with Yankees-themed T-shirts and Dodgers-themed hoodies among the collection.

Abbie Hutzler, divisional merchandise manager at Pacsun, said the company is putting more emphasis on sports partnerships.

“These growing partnerships give apparel brands the opportunity to design and curate exclusive and unique collections for their customers that they can’t find anywhere else,” Hutzler said. “It’s inspiring to see all the different collaborations come to life in the industry and, although they stem from the same teams and leagues, there is so much differentiation, giving all fans the opportunity to purchase something that works for them and their style.”

Baseball players’ looks are often showcased on the growing Instagram account @mlb.fits. With 124,000 followers, the account is much smaller than its NBA counterpart, @leaguefits (1 million followers). Despite basketball’s outsized place in American popular culture, baseball is actually more popular by viewership. The World Series regularly averages nearly 15 million viewers. No NBA final has surpassed that number since 2019, with most NBA finals averaging around 10.5 million viewers.

The Yankees, in particular, have been a favorite for fashion collaborations for years. This year alone, the team has partnered with Supreme, New York or Nowhere, and Billionaire Boys Club. The tradition of popular Yankees-related apparel goes back to at least the 1940s, as a recent post from the Met Costume Institute shows.