Walking Away From the Tunnel Walk
The New York Times
Kyle Kuzma unleashed an arms race of pregame N.B.A. style. Now he plans to wear a bland sweatsuit to every game. Will others follow suit?
Last week, the N.B.A. was rocked by a surprise retirement announcement — though no one actually left the league.
Kyle Kuzma, 29, a forward for the Washington Wizards whose outlandish outfits have occasionally overshadowed his on-court skills, told Vogue that he would no longer wear a distinct outfit for his team’s 82 regular season games. Instead, he plans to wear a variation of a banal gray sweatsuit for each tunnel walk into the arena.
“I don’t want to be a part of that type of community where you have to put on a fit,” Mr. Kuzma told Vogue.
For the N.B.A. fashion world, this is the equivalent of Michael Jordan retiring midcareer to try his hand at baseball. From spiky sweatsuits, to crochet cardigans, to mob-wife furs, Mr. Kuzma had left no trend unturned in his first seven years in the league, setting a new bar for camp. To a game in 2021, he wore a bubble gum pink Raf Simons knit with elephant-trunk sleeves. That look was so notorious that the Wizards made a bobblehead of Mr. Kuzma wearing it. Last year, he pulled off a Rick Owens puffer with an attached snood, as if a sickly black worm was munching on his face.
And so, if Mr. Kuzma is leaving the tunnel fit game behind, he’s exiting a chaotic, “please look at me!” world that he helped create.
“He was the guy who got things rolling in terms of the tunnel of becoming an internet thing,” said Ian Pierno, who runs @leaguefits, an offshoot of SLAM magazine.
