For most of the last decade, the walk from the team bus to the locker room became its own fashion runway, with players using pregame tunnel fashion to build personal brands built on sharp tailoring, bold prints, and the kind of outfits that got dissected on social media before tipoff. Lately, a chunk of that formality has started to loosen, with more players showing up in tracksuits and hoodies instead of the suiting that defined the genre for years. Josh Giddey has been one of the more visible faces of that shift.
The look isn't laziness so much as a different kind of statement. A well-chosen tracksuit, especially one pulled from a designer or limited collaboration rather than a team-issued set, still signals taste and awareness of what's current, just through a different vocabulary than a tailored blazer does. It trades formality for a kind of off-duty confidence, the sense that a player's style doesn't need a structured silhouette to read as intentional.
Comfort as a style statement, not a shortcut
Part of the shift tracks with where fashion at large has been heading. Streetwear's influence on menswear hasn't slowed down, and oversized, texture-driven pieces have become just as common on runways as on the street, blurring the line between what counts as elevated and what counts as athleisure. Players picking tracksuits over suits are, in a sense, just following the same direction the rest of fashion has already been moving in.