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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Flyest of Them All? Mitchell Jackson on Fashion and the NBA.
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A story of basketball we haven’t seen before, blending history with timely themes of race, media, politics and culture. Fly traces the growth of basketball set against the backdrop of the growth of America through Civil Rights. This is a gorgeous book, both in its overall aesthetic and in its narrative prowess.
A crucial fact about me: I’m from Portland, Oregon. One of my hometown’s AKA’s is RIP City. It was christened such because we love our Trailblazers. When I was a young buck, the Blazers had a great team, even battled Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the 1992 Finals. The starting five of that Blazers squad were Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter, Jerome Kersey, Buck Williams, and Kevin Duckworth. If I close my eyes, I can picture each of those players in their uniform. However, I can conjure no such image of them in street clothes. The reason is that I never saw them in street clothes, never witnessed them getting out of their cars in the garage of the Memorial Coliseum, was never shown them strolling through the cold halls of the arena into the locker room. Nor do I recall seeing them dressed at a table in a press conference.
But my oh my, what a difference a couple of decades has made. We are living in the most fashionable era of professional sports and the NBA is the forerunner of fashion in pro sports. The league might not have invented drip, but they had the good sense to showcase it. These days, while the current Blazers aren’t making the finals any time soon, one of their stars, Jerami Grant, received the “People’s Champ” award from prominent NBA account @LeagueFits last year (and has been fashioning himself for a repeat win this season). These days, the players flaunt their fashion in the “tunnels” every game, making their arena walks every bit as important as a fashion runway. These days, players display their drip during post-game interviews and their own uber-followed Instagram accounts. These days, players model for heritage fashion houses (peep Lebron for Louis Vuitton) and design their very own fashion lines (Russell Westbrook’s Honor the Gift). These days, players attend fashion week shows and sit front row.
FLY is a book that captures and contextualizes what’s happening in the world of NBA fashion, an ambition which called for tracing the phenomenon to its root. The book spans the league from its inception in 1949 to the present day. The book is divided into six eras with each defined by a some social, cultural, or political force.
In the years of those great Blazer teams, the NBA touted itself as “fantastic,” but in the here-and-now the league is as flyest in all the land. My book charts the story why, how, when it soared to that height.