For Fashion, Sports Stars Are the New Superstars

In the late 1990s, something strange started happening on the cover of glossy magazines. Instead of models, movie stars increasingly became the faces of choice. By 1998, Linda Wells, then the editor of the beauty magazine Allure, announced to her staff, “Nobody cares about models anymore.”

A quarter century later, we are at another tipping point. Actors are out, and athletes are in. And not just in the world of men’s wear, which has long embraced the sports world as part of the fashion world for reasons related to long-held gender stereotypes), but in all worlds.

“Sports stars are the new Hollywood stars,” said Jens Grede, a co-founder of Skims, a brand that reached a $4 billion valuation in four years in part by focusing campaigns on athletes. So far, the Skims stable has included the soccer star Neymar, the N.B.A. star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Olympic gold medal gymnast Sunisa Lee and a host of W.N.B.A. standouts, including Skylar Diggins-Smith and Cameron Brink.

“We live in the era of hyper-personalization,” Mr. Grede said, speaking at a conference about sports and fashion organized by The New York Times in Paris this month ahead of the Summer Olympics. “My content feed looks tremendously different from yours or anyone else’s. As people, as a community, as society, we have fewer and fewer big cultural touch points. Sports might be the only place today where we meet across age, racial, social-economic, religious or political lines. So sport has become an important unifying force.”

The Olympic gold medal gymnast Sunisa Lee in a Skims ad campaign shot. Credit…Skims

Antoine Arnault, the head of the image and the environment for LVMH, said at the Times event that he believes athletes “are probably even more emotionally connected to everyone” than famous names from film or music.