On a rainy Monday evening in New York City earlier this month, many of the world’s most famous and glamorous people gathered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala, one of the tentpole events for the celebrity fashion elite.
Eyes, cameras and Instagram accounts were all trained on the red carpet, where the stars included everyone from Kim Kardashian and Rihanna to Simone Biles and Lewis Hamilton. It’s a singular opportunity for fashion designers and celebrities to make their mark. For newcomers, it’s a chance to carve out a spot in the discourse, and for the veterans, it’s a platform to cement their status as style icons. This year, nine current or retired NFL players participated, the most of any league, including Saquon Barkley, Joe Burrow, Stefon Diggs, DeAndre Hopkins, Jalen Hurts, Justin Jefferson, Colin Kaepernick, Jonathan Owens and Russell Wilson.
The mere presence of NFL or other pro athletes in a luxury fashion context isn’t unusual; former New York Giants cornerback Jason Sehorn appeared at the Met Gala as early as 2003. But historically, these appearances have been driven by the players, their agents and personal commercial relationships, with little involvement from their teams or leagues. This year that changed — because behind the scenes, helping all these players, was an NFL employee.
Kyle Smith, a 31-year-old stylist, was overseeing his first Met Gala as NFL fashion editor. It’s believed to be the first title of its kind for a major pro sports league, and a culmination of key trends for sports, athletes and Smith’s improbable career path.
“I love it,” said Smith, who mostly ignored sports until he joined the league six years ago as a wardrobe assistant at NFL Network. “I can’t believe this is my job.”
Smith started the day around 9 a.m. at the Met’s media briefing to ensure he understood the theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” on an intimate level, and to get an early look at exhibit and museum space. All players had their own personal stylists, but Smith played a detailed coordinating and support role, creating behind-the-scenes content, suggesting collections they might not have seen and helping them with fittings.
Smith also briefed the players on the details of their outfits and the theme, so they were ready for media questions on the red carpet. In particular he helped Hopkins, wide receiver for the Ravens, prepare talking points for how he embodied the night’s theme. Then he saw them off. “I’m a proud mother, waving goodbye to them as they get in the car and have their last looks and head off to one of the biggest nights of their career,” Smith said.
Next, he shifted into the content production side of his job, editing NFL Media’s own social and digital coverage of the day, which attracted 37 million impressions and 1 million engagements across 26 total posts. Those pictures — glitzy, much-shared images of football stars taking their turn as fashion models — sit at the cutting edge of modern NFL marketing, which is focused on finding new fans for its work off the field as much as on.
The night was a huge success. During an otherwise slow time on the NFL calendar, the league and some of its key stars were in the limelight again — this time with their helmets off, out of uniform and showing some individuality.
“It all ties together, the ways in which we’re engaging more casual fans, fans who may not be watching football on Sundays, who might be coming in from different aspects,” said Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of influence marketing, and Smith’s boss. “It all ties really well together from a fan development perspective, and then clearly there are commercial opportunities connected to fashion that are almost too many to number at this point.”
Under CMO Tim Ellis, the NFL has been pushing a “helmets off” strategy of marketing its players for years. Its key verticals are gaming, music and fashion, areas where players have natural interests that can be leveraged in a strategic way by team and league marketers.
At the same time, Smith said, generational changes in sports culture and athlete norms have opened a window for widespread participation from players.
“Until very recently, it felt like if you were interested in fashion, you couldn’t be interested in sports,” Smith said. “It felt like those worlds were very disconnected, and I think with Gen Z, Gen Alpha, we’re realizing you can be very multifaceted, and you can be interested in both. It doesn’t take away from each other. In fact, they really go hand-in-hand and help each other.”
Smith, born in New London, Conn., and raised in Los Angeles, where he still lives, got his start in 2016 as an assistant to celebrity stylist Karla Welch, whose clients include Justin Bieber, Amy Poehler and Olivia Wilde. He also interned at the fashion house Amiri and opened his own studio before joining NFL Network six years ago.
There, in between his job of helping network talent choose their clothes, he started to notice the “tunnel fits,” the clothes players wear as they enter the stadium hours before a game. Putting live cameras on players at that moment in a pregame show is a TV tactic at least two decades old, and usually is just a backdrop for a few stats or projections about the upcoming game.
But Smith saw it through the eyes of a stylist, not a football fan. He realized that some players take those moments to share their personality with the world before putting on a helmet and uniform and participating in the ultimate team sport. He was intrigued and inspired.
“I remember watching tunnel fits and I think it was [longtime Saints defensive end] Cam Jordan, he was wearing something so crazy,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘This person’s so cool. I want to know more about him.’ And then it was also [quarterback] Cam Newton. I was like, ‘Those hats are so crazy, what’s he doing?’ I wanted to know so much more and get into the culture of football.”
Under Welch, Smith saw how her clients used fashion strategically to advance their personal brands, which in turn created business opportunities. Take Bieber, for instance. Once it became clear that he was a clotheshorse, luxury brands came to him.
“Brands would send him anything he wanted; too much stuff, really,” Smith said. “And they weren’t doing that for athletes. I realized there was an opportunity to allow athletes that same opportunity to grow their own brand.”
Smith left the NFL Network after 10 months, but by then he’d created an Instagram account, @playthelook, devoted to players’ styles. It’s now defunct, but it got attention from players — many of whom wanted to be featured — and the league.
In 2021, Smith joined the NFL as a content strategist full time, and today he operates @nflstyle, a decade-old account that originally focused on fan fashions and officially licensed NFL gear, but has since adjusted to feature players’ tunnel fits, too.
Meanwhile, he styles a growing list of players on his own, including Bengals quarterback Burrow and Vikings wide receiver Jefferson. When Smith started as content strategist in 2021, word spread quickly about his expertise and relationships. Burrow’s agents at WME, now WIN Sports Group, came to Smith when they wanted to get him into a GQ Super Bowl party, and later, Fashion Week. Others have come to Smith through player word-of-mouth and media coverage. Burrow, Jefferson and Smith attended the Vogue World fashion show together in Paris last summer.
It was such a hit, Smith was given the newly created title of fashion editor around the start of the 2024 season. The “editor” title suggests a heavy role in content, which he has, but he is also still a hands-on stylist and bridge between the NFL and the fashion world, a critical part of the equation.
The Paris event proved to be a watershed moment for how the NFL sees fashion. Before it began, Smith said many planners were skeptical that American football players should be involved. It was an Olympics-themed event coinciding with the Paris 2024 Summer Games, and football wasn’t part of the sports program. As Smith tells the story, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour settled the debate: “Her note was: If we want American attention, we need to have American football in this.”
That anecdote was surely catnip to NFL owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell, who are investing heavily in exporting the game in pursuit of global media rights revenue. For that to work, the NFL can’t simply be the biggest thing going in the United States; it has to transcend national borders.
“We think about it as a vehicle to open up new paths to fandom, especially in other countries,” Trombetta said. “I’m sure you’ve been to Europe or different parts of Latin America; fashion plays an even bigger role in a lot of those countries than it does in the U.S., or at least many of the cities in the U.S.”
Given the global appeal of flag football, Smith is expected to have an important voice in how the NFL thinks about promoting that sport’s Olympic debut in 2028. “Kyle’s role, and this broader view on fashion, really will play a strong [part] for the storytelling that’s going to come out of that,” said Trombetta.
Smith has no direct reports but is in daily contact with people from a range of divisions at the league, including the social team, consumer products and marketing. Day to day, his work is an eclectic mix of personal styling, content strategy and business. Take one week last November: he started on Monday in Los Angeles watching tape of all the players’ tunnel walks from the day before; flew to Berlin to speak at a fashion film festival; came back to L.A. on Thursday and had to stop by Louis Vuitton to pick up a pair of sunglasses for Burrow; then hit some brand events on Friday.
Then on Saturday, he joined Burrow virtually for a remote fitting (league rules prevent stylists from being with players on game road trips) for the new look they were building for the next day’s game at SoFi Stadium against the Chargers. Burrow would wear a custom suit made by Alo, which Smith had to pick up upon arriving in L.A. from Berlin and send to the Bengals’ hotel before the virtual styling session. The day after that game, Smith was in Dallas to help with a photo shoot with the Cowboys cheerleaders.
In the NFL fan development marketing strategy, fashion is a coequal partner with video games and music. All of those verticals offer similar opportunities to find new fans because their demographics overlap with football’s, and critically, many NFL players are organically interested in those cultures on their own, making it an ideal platform for players to promote themselves alongside the league.
But commercially, the NFL is light-years ahead in video games and music, due to its long-standing relationships with Madden publisher EA Sports in the former category, and with Roc Nation and Apple Music for its halftime show in the latter category. It also means the average NFL business-side employee knows a lot about those worlds and has personal connections at the top of those markets.
Fashion, however, is a different story. “We have tremendous relationships in fashion with licensing partners, with brands like Nike and Fanatics, but in terms of the higher-end editorial components, we didn’t have as much of that,” Trombetta said. “So that’s where Kyle really excels. When we’re talking about Paris Fashion Week or the Met Gala, those are areas that don’t naturally fit within a league operation. You really need to have someone that’s immersed in that space, to elevate and find the different angles to bring players in, or just what the natural storylines could be off of it.”
The big commercial payoff for the league is in brand reputation, which (it hopes) opens new doors to sponsorship sales and licensing. “It’s opening the eyes of new partners who wouldn’t normally see the NFL as being a natural place for fashion, and some of the different opportunities for us. You’re seeing more luxury brands, companies that 10 years ago wouldn’t necessarily look at the NFL in that light,” Trombetta said.
Historically, fashion houses have not played in sports much. But the NFL’s real payoff may not come from a conventional sponsorship or licensing deal with a fashion house, but rather from a “halo effect” that over time pushes the NFL’s brand further up market, said April Guidone, COO of SMAC Entertainment, which represents Diggs among other top athletes.
“So maybe you’d see a Porsche start to evaluate the NFL opportunity where if they didn’t have this fashion alignment, you wouldn’t necessarily have that,” Guidone said. “It doesn’t have to be luxury fashion for a commercialization opportunity, but luxury brands in other categories could see the NFL in a different light.”
While Smith works to push the cutting edge of elite fashion, the NFL also has tried to develop a spot in the grassroots scene. Since 2020, NFL teams have been allowed to work outside the primary league licensing relationships to collaborate on limited runs of clothes made by local designers, for sale only in their markets. For instance, the Rams launched a line with L.A. streetwear brand BornxRaised.
While those relationships lack the global star power of, say, Fashion Week or the Met Gala, executives say they are valuable tools to develop team affinity locally.
More players want to get into fashion, and Trombetta says he expects Smith’s portfolio to keep growing. But they won’t push it too far, keenly aware that this works only if the players are truly interested in fashion.
Guidone, who oversaw revenue and brand management for IMG’s fashion events before joining SMAC, said the NFL needs to resist the urge to center its own intellectual property in the fashion space. “They really have to let go, and let the luxury fashion designers lead and let Kyle lead,” she said.
At the core of Smith’s work is a belief that fashion can help the NFL find new fans. It’s already happened for at least one person: Smith himself, who after a lifetime of ignoring sports has grown close to players such as Burrow.
“I’m so much more genuinely interested in the game itself now,” said Smith. “Because now when I watch, I think, ‘Oh, that’s my friend on the field.’”
