Courtney Mays’ roster of athlete clients is large enough to form an impressive basketball team.

The Los Angeles-based stylist and menswear consultant works with 12-time NBA All-Star Chris Paul, former NBA championship winner Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers and DeAndre Jordan, who won the championship with the Denver Nuggets earlier this year. In the WNBA, she has worked with three-time championship winner Diana Taurasi, former basketball player and Olympic gold medalist Sue Bird, and most recently, nine-time All-Star Brittney Griner.

Mays is among a group of burgeoning stylists recruited by athletes for their services that increasingly extend far beyond putting together nice outfits for their public appearances and tunnel walks. In previous years, only the highest profile athletes would have personal stylists, but these days young athletes are hiring stylists and fashion consultants as soon as they break onto the scene as a way of boosting their marketability in the eyes of brands, which increasingly look to work with rookies.

Social media has allowed young sportspeople to sculpt their own personal brands from the very outset of their careers, making them invaluable partners in the eyes of fashion businesses. Dior ambassador Kylian Mbappé, a 24-year-old World Cup-winning French footballer, has over 109 million Instagram followers compared to the luxury house’s 45 million. Social platforms have allowed fashion and sports to informally converge, exemplified by accounts like @LeagueFits, which tracks NBA player style, with nearly 1 million followers on Instagram, and @FootballerFits, with over 1.5 million on TikTok.

As more athletes are invited to sit front row at the biggest fashion week shows in Paris and Milan, their need for stylists, rather than “plugs” — a niche economy of personal shoppers who bring selections of logo-heavy luxury and streetwear items to athletes’ houses or hotel rooms for them to buy and style themselves — is on the rise.

While the convergence of fashion and sport is well documented, what often flies under the radar is the multifaceted roles that stylists and fashion consultants perform, helping mould their athlete clients into lifestyle influencers, and laying the groundwork for lucrative brand deals.

There’s the expected task of dressing athletes for glitzy events like award ceremonies and film premieres, but athletes now also hire stylists for overall wardrobe consultancy services, identifying a style and labels that reflect the personal brand they want to build away from their sport. Meanwhile, stylists are becoming valuable conduits between their athletes and the fashion industry, procuring access to shows, VIP events and editorial opportunities, helping build relationships with brands and designers for clients who have neither the time nor the connections necessary to achieve this themselves.

There are lucrative opportunities at stake for young, marketable athletes who are eager to break into the fashion industry. Spanish tennis star Carlos Alcaraz, winner of Wimbledon and the US Open, was tapped for an ambassador role at Louis Vuitton in June, aged just 19, while his 22-year-old Italian rival Jannik Sinner was hired for a similar role by Gucci the following month.

“The new generation of sports stars is pushing away from the previous model of simply signing a broad range of endorsement deals,” said Zakaria Laaboudi, an agent at Creative Artists Agency who manages the off-field interests of footballers including Burberry ambassador Heung-min Son. “An athlete choosing to partner with a luxury fashion house, rather than having a series of sports endorsements, really helps differentiate their image.”

More Than Just a Stylist

Shortly after Brittney Griner was released from a 10-month-long detainment in a Russian prison following a high profile prisoner swap, the WNBA legend approached Mays for help with her personal style and image at a time of intense global media scrutiny.

She dressed Griner for key public appearances following her return from Russia: firstly, in a formal black evening suit for the NAACP Image Awards in February, and then in a custom-made Calvin Klein cream-coloured suit for the Met Gala in May. A unique challenge of styling athletes, especially basketball players, is factoring time to ensure outfits can be tailored or created from scratch to meet their measurements, which most brands don’t cater to, Mays said (Griner is 6 feet 9 inches tall, while her other client DeAndre Jordan is 6 feet 11 inches).

For Chris Paul, May’s first athlete client, she consulted on his overall styling and public image during his eight-year tenure as president of the NBA association, which ended in 2021, dressing him in more suiting and business casual attire even in more relaxed settings. In 2020, when issues of racial justice were at the forefront of society in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Mays worked with Paul to help shine a light on historically black colleges and universities, with Paul turning up to games in more relaxed outfits, wearing T-shirts that paid homage to different colleges, leading to widespread media attention and even several brand collaborations.

“Fashion is impacting these sports in ways no one thought was possible a few years ago,” Mays said. “Younger fans especially are tuning in or watching clips online because they want to see what their favourite players are wearing, as much as they do the actual game.”

Another important aspect of Mays’ role is working with athletes to help build their relationships with coveted brands.

“At first, a lot of them expect they can go from wearing Nike sweats every day to being dressed by Kim Jones in two seconds,” she said. “But now these guys are understanding more and more that the way they dress long-term can inform business deals they get off the court.”

Connecting the Dots

Athletes in Europe have found it harder to explore their interests in fashion compared to their US counterparts, thanks to more restrictive views on the role of sportspeople.

Netflix’s viral “Beckham” documentary, which launched in October, chronicles how former Manchester United and Real Madrid footballer David Beckham was hounded by tabloid newspapers in the early 2000s for being one of the first athletes to pursue interests in fashion whilst still in their playing career. Even in recent years, footballers in Europe like Héctor Bellerín and Serge Gnabry have received online abuse and criticism from traditional fans (and in the case of Gnabry, by his own team’s manager) for attending fashion week shows on their days off.

But lately, a group of young athletes and their well connected stylists are normalising closer relationships between fashion and sport in the region.

Algen Hamilton is one such stylist. The 23-year-old Londoner has been known for several years to a growing collective of football-fashion fans thanks to his reputation for styling some of the Premier League’s most fashionable young footballers as they broke onto the scene, including Arsenal players Reiss Nelson and Kai Havertz, Chelsea’s Trevor Chalobah and Joe Willock of Newcastle United.

“Footballers have so much more about them than just the sport they play, but they’ve never been allowed to express themselves outside of that previously,” Hamilton said. “My work with these guys is all about presenting their whole personalities, their passions and interests, through the medium of fashion.”

Hamilton’s services are recruited by these athletes not just for his eye for style, but for his role as a conduit to the fashion industry itself. His own brand, a luxury menswear label called Bill Pickett, has a cult following among fashion insiders and footballers alike, and had its debut collection stocked at London-based boutique Machine-A. Hamilton accompanies clients such as Chalobah — and works alongside their management to secure invites — to shows, fittings, VIP dinners and parties at fashion weeks in Paris, Milan and London, and builds relationships with designers to facilitate longer-term collaborations with his athletes.

“Fashion week can be a crazy time, with multiple clients in different locations, with completely different schedules, but you can really see the movement building each season,” Hamilton said. “Now guys like Trevor [Chalobah] are creating their own path as sportspeople in the world of fashion.”

Fellow London-based celebrity stylist Carlotta Constant was approached four years ago by Premier League footballer Mason Mount after they met on a shoot for a Nike campaign. She has since helped him develop his own personal style and establish him as a regular on the fashion circuit, styling the Manchester United player for editorial shoots with GQ, for example, or attending the Monaco Grand Prix.

“I’ll often connect [Mount] with brands I work closely with, facilitating direct conversations between him and the key people from brands,” said Constant, who also recently styled footballer Eberechi Eze of Crystal Palace for his front row appearance at Burberry’s Spring/Summer 2024 show in London. “For his Ballon d’Or [award] nomination look we collaborated with Versace, working closely with their team, even turning Donatella Versace into a fan.”

Observers of the sports industry see a case for European athletes diversifying their image away from just the games they win.

“Europe has taken some time to catch up because for a long while [US athlete] salaries were dwarfing what we saw here in Europe,” said Clive Reeves, UK sports leader at PwC. “Now, athletes in Europe realising the value of their personal brand and are aligning themselves with sectors that make sense to them for commercial gain.”

Editor’s Note: This article was amended on 10 October 2023. A previous version misstated that Zakaria Laaboudi manages footballer Jack Grealish. Laaboudi has no affiliation with Grealish.