LAUSR

The National Basketball Association is as popular as ever. A league dominated by Black players is in the midst of a fashion renaissance. The purpose of this paper is to explore how fashion stylists dress Black National Basketball Association players. Using a semi-structured interview protocol, the author interviewed 18 fashion stylists to investigate how they service Black National Basketball Association clients. After reviewing the transcripts and going through three rounds of coding, three themes were identified: The Black Body Is Different, It Should Be This Way, and Dress For Yourself And Dress For Others. Using Bourdieu’s cultural intermediary as a conceptual framework, I demonstrate how fashion stylists link the Black National Basketball Association player with high fashion, making National Basketball Association style more a reflection of middle-class ideology than individual clients.