How much does the profession of basketball intersect with the art of dressing? According to gritty NBA forward and notable fashion plate PJ Tucker, only so much.
“They don’t even correlate to me,” says Tucker in an interview that appears in Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, a new coffee table-style book by Portland-born author Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math). “The way I play and the way I dress. Like night and day. I guess it’s kind of impossible to dress like I play, ‘cause, you know, I’d probably look like a homeless person.”
NBA players are tall, in excellent shape, young, rich, and famous: This gives them everything they need to operate as models for bespoke clothing. Who cares if dressing well has little to do with the actual playing of the game of basketball? A survey of the style of NBA players from the post-war era until now still functions as a survey of fashionable-yet-highly-wearable clothing that might be otherwise overlooked and thus forgotten.