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.
AndrewsDLMowerRLSilkML (2011) Ghettocentrism and the essentialized Black male athlete. In: LeonardDK (ed.) Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp.69–93.
2.
AtencioMBealBYochimE (2013) “It aint just black kids and white kids”: The representation and reproduction of authentic “skurban” masculinities. Sociology of Sport Journal30: 153–172.
3.
BakerS (2012) Retailing retro: Class, cultural capital and the material practices of the (re)evaluation of style. European Journal of Cultural Studies15: 621–641.
4.
BeckerH (1974) Art as collective action. American Sociological Review39: 767–776.
5.
BeckerH (1982) Art Worlds. London: University of California Press.
6.
BernierC (2015) A visual call to arms against the caricature of my own face: From fugitive slave to fugitive image in Frederick Douglass’s theory of portraiture. Journal of American Studies49: 323–357.
7.
BettsL (2014) Working-class masculinity and fashion: David Beckam, Del Boy and the representation of taste. Film, Fashion, & Consumption3: 211–226.
8.
BlairE (2015) A reflexive exploration of two qualitative coding techniques. Journal of Methods and Measurement in the Social Sciences6: 14–29.
BotteroWCrossleyN (2012) Worlds, fields and networks: Becker, Bourdieu and the structures of social relations. Cultural Sociology5: 99–119.
11.
BourdieuP (1979) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
12.
BourdieuP (1983) The field of cultural production, or: The economic world reversed. Poetics12: 311–356.
13.
BourdieuP (1986) The forms of capital. In: RichardsonJG (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, pp.241–258.
14.
CarringtonB (2010) Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora. London: SAGE.
15.
CollinsP (2006) New commodities, new consumers: Selling blackness in a global marketplace. Ethnicities6: 297–317.
16.
CramerL (2019) Cam Newton and Russell Westbrook’s symbolic resistance to Whiteness in the NFL and NBA. Howard Journal of Communications30: 57-75.
17.
CroninA (2004) Regimes of mediation: Advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries?Consumption Markets & Culture7: 349–369.
18.
De B’beriBHogarthP (2009) White America’s construction of Black bodies: The case of Ron Artest as a model of covert racial ideology in the NBA’s discourse. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication2: 89–106.
19.
DickersonN (2016) Constructing the digitized sporting body: Black and White masculinity in NBA/NHL internet memes. Communication & Sport4: 303–330.
20.
DunneS (2017) #WeareTrayvonMartin: The racially packaged NBA commodity and the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. Sport in Society20: 924–937.
21.
DyerR (1997) The light of the world. In: DyerR (ed) White. New York: Routledge, pp.82-144.
22.
EntmanRBookC (2000) Light makes right: Skin colour racial hierarchy in television advertising. In: AndersenRStrateL (eds) Critical Studies in Media Commercialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.214–224.
23.
FlorczakK (2017) Adding truth to the matter: The case for qualitative research. Nursing Science Quarterly30: 296–299.
24.
FosterG (2005) Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
25.
GiannoulakisCDrayerJ (2009) Thugs versus good guys: The impact of NBA Cares on player image. European Sport Management Quarterly9: 453–468.
26.
GrbichC (2007) Qualitative Data Analysis: An Introduction. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
27.
GreenL (2014) Transforming the image of Black masculinity in the NBA: A rhetorical analysis of the NBA Cares Program. Master’s thesis, Wake Forest University, USA. Available at: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/39305 (accessed 2 May 2019).
28.
HatchA (2002) Doing Qualitative Research in Educational Settings. Albany: State University of New York Press.
29.
HughesG (2004) Managing Black guys: Representation, corporate culture, and the NBA. Sociology of Sport Journal21: 163–184.
30.
KellyA (2014) Advertising. In: MaguireJMatthewsJ (eds) The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. London: SAGE, pp.67–76.
31.
KobayashiK (2012) Corporate nationalism and glocalization of Nike advertising in Asia: Production and representation practices of cultural intermediaries. Sociology of Sport Journal29: 42–61.
32.
KobayashiKJacksonSSamM (2018) Multiple dimensions of mediation within transnational advertising production: Cultural intermediaries as shapers of emerging cultural capital. Consumption Markets & Culture21: 129–146.
33.
LawlerS (2005) Disgusted subjects: The making of middle-class identities. The Sociological Review53: 429–446.
34.
LeonardD (2012) After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
35.
McDonaldMTogliaJ (2010) Dressed for success: The workings of Whiteness and corporate culture. Sports in Society13: 970–983.
36.
MaguireJMatthewsJ (2014) The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. London: SAGE.
37.
MearsA (2010) Size zero high-end ethnic: Cultural production and the reproduction of culture in fashion modeling. Poetics38: 21–46.
38.
MillerM (2009) Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
39.
MoraldeO (2019) The NBA dandy plays the fashion game: NBA all-star all-style and dress codes of Black masculinity. Journal of Popular Culture52: 53–74.
40.
MorrisR (2001) Reading photographically: Translating whiteness through the eyes of the empire. Hectate27: 86–96.
41.
PalmerT (2017) What feels more than feeling? Theorizing the unthinkability of Black affect. Critical Ethnic Studies3: 31–56.
42.
ParkM (2015) Race, hegemonic masculinity, and the “Linpossible!”: An analysis of media representations of Jeremy Lin. Communication & Sport3: 367–389.
43.
PartingtonA (2014) Class, clothes, and co-creativity. Clothing Cultures1: 7–21.
PoupeauF (2000) Reasons for domination, Bourdieu versus Habermas. In: FowlerB (ed) Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp.69-87.
SahaA (2018) Race and the Cultural Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press.
48.
SaldanaJ (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. New York: SAGE.
49.
TuckerL (2003) Blackballed: Basketball and representations of the Black male athlete. American Behavioral Scientist47: 306–328.
50.
WarnerH (2013) Fashion, celebrity and cultural workers: SJP as cultural intermediary. Media, Culture & Society35: 382–391.
51.
WissingerE (2012) Managing the semiotics of skin tone: Race and aesthetic labor in the fashion modeling industry. Economic and Industrial Democracy33: 125–143.
