New Stance "ambassador" Klay Thompson models the new wares. Photo: Stance
The history of the NBA’s relationship with fashion is long, varied, and full of increasingly gnarly sartorial swerves. The newest chapter? Socks. Lots and lots of printed socks. Yesterday, the league announced a deal with sockmaker Stance that makes the smallish company the sport’s official on-court hosiery provider. It’s notable for a few reasons, chief among them that in recent years the league hasn’t strayed from simple white (home team) or black (away) socks that carried nothing more than the NBA logo. Stance, to this point best known for those gaudy pairs that carry images of basketball legends, is shaking things up. In addition to basic black and white, the collection swaps out monochrome, un-logoed socks for elaborate designs in team-specific colors, with stripes, gradations, and—most jarringly—the Stance logo. (For context: not even Adidas, which makes the league’s jerseys, gets logo real estate.) The move echoes the NBA’s recent (and terrifically unpopular) push to get teams into sleeved jerseys. The rationale for that move was simultaneously cynical and dorky: the NBA, fearing that flabby fans weren’t eager to purchase tank tops, wanted to give consumers a more flattering option. The driver of this new deal, ESPN reports, is the "sock craze," the newish phenomenon of dudes shelling out coin for, yes, colorful socks. In effect, Stance is betting that the average NBA fan has the same appetite for hyper-branded socks as footwear-obsessed teens. All told, it’s a drop in the bucket for NBA style, and a slightly bigger ripple for, uh, sock collectors, we guess?