This week, with the Super Bowl around the corner, we take a look at brands offering a more stylish take on licensed sports merchandise, and what’s driving the considerable demand for these products.
Some have called it “the Taylor Swift effect.” The singer’s custom-designed coat, based on the jersey of her fiancée, Travis Kelce, which she wore to a game in 2024, showed many female sports fans that sports gear wasn’t limited to oversized jerseys and foam fingers.
Since then, demand for more stylish, fashion-forward sports gear has grown, and both new and existing brands are rushing to meet that need. With major sporting events happening in the U.S. this year and shifting demographics among sports fans, the market is more welcoming than ever for brands to offer stylish sports merchandise.
Erin Andrews, the sportscaster and sideline reporter for Fox Sports, is also the founder of Wear by Erin Andrews. Since 2019, Wear has had licensed deals with the NFL. It has since added many other teams and leagues, including the NBA, MLB, the NHL, U.S. Soccer and 38 NCAA sports teams.
Wear’s apparel covers a wide array of product categories, including jackets, dresses, loungewear, handbags, jewelry and even baby clothes, all of which are officially licensed to sport team logos, colors and names. The brand is sold drect to consumer and through retailers including Nordstrom and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Andrews told Glossy that, since she founded her brand, she has seen both the demand for stylish sports merch and the number of brands making it skyrocket, with sales doubling over the last two years. She has expanded Wear’s product categories in recent months, plus the brand has collaborated with BaubleBar and Rebecca Minkoff.
“It took several years to get people to listen, but look around now,” she said. “Team apparel is everywhere. It has blown up. Female sports fans want to be fashionable.”
According to data provided to Glossy by Circana, the total apparel market was flat in 2025, but apparel with sports logos grew by 22% across men’s, women’s and kids’. Women’s sports apparel, meanwhile, has grown three times as fast as other categories in the same period.
That growing demand is enticing to brands that specialize in sports apparel, like Wear and Off Season, as well as more general apparel brands like Abercrombie & Fitch. The latter is the NFL’s official fashion partner and has increasingly produced licensed apparel featuring NFL logos. In November, Abercrombie CEO Fran Horowitz said the NFL partnership has been “definitely bringing in new customers” and that the company views it primarily as a customer-acquisition tool.
Kristen Classi-Zummo, executive direction and industry advisor for apparel at Circana, told Glossy that it makes sense that brands would latch onto sports at a time when consumers are cutting back on their spending.
“As apparel continues to be a discretionary category in a world where consumers are increasingly scrutinizing every purchase, leaning into big moments, merchandise or fandom is a way to tap into powerful outfitting triggers throughout the year,” Classi-Zummo said. “Sports affiliation has become one of the few purchase justifications strong enough to open wallets in today’s selective spending environment.”
There’s an undeniable demographic element to the growth of stylish sports merchandise. According to the NFL, viewership of the sport is now 44% women, and according to YouGov, more than 4 million women became NFL fans in just the last year. Vicky Picca, president of the sports apparel brand Off Season, told Glossy that she can feel that shift happening across the industry.
“We see a huge number of male WNBA fans whenever we drop a WNBA collection,” she said. “We see women engaging more with all sports, both men’s and women’s. I sat in a room with 10 women from one of our retail partners, and we spent 30 minutes talking about the previous night’s football game.”
Off Season, which was founded a year ago by fashion designer Kristin Juszczyk and Skims co-founder Emma Grede, has swiftly become one of the most talked-about fashionable licensed sports brands thanks to support from notable women like Taylor Swift, who famously wore a custom jacket designed by Juszczyk to a 2024 game, before Off Season had even launched.
Picca, who comes from the world of sports and previously worked at Fanatics, said that, for a long time, the prevailing way to make women’s sports merch was to take the men’s styles and make them pink or add a V-neck. Now, there are far more varieties of sports merch for women.
Pat Decrescenzo, founder of the marketing agency Nova House, which works with the licensed sports apparel brand Starter, told Glossy that the women’s influence in sports fashion is only growing. Starter is hosting a style-forward Super Bowl pop-up in San Francisco that lets customers create custom Starter jackets with vintage logos and branding from different NFL teams.
“It’s a combination of demographics and sports and fashion intersectionality,” he said. “The women’s market is becoming just as important as the men’s. We’re at the Starter x NFL Super Bowl Pop-Up now, and the sales are truly split evenly between men and women. Recently, we have seen more women in the sports space than ever before — on the sidelines reporting, on the field and court, and more. Women have always set the tone for what is cool in fashion, and now we’re seeing that influence come through in sports.”
But there’s still more to be done in this space. Assia Grazioli-Venier is a founding partner at the VC firm Muse Capital and sport advisory firm Muse Sport, and helped launch Juventus Women, an Italian women’s sports team, in 2017. She told Glossy that, according to a 2024 report from Klarna, female sports fans are 60% more likely than men to say they struggle to find the right style in sports merchandise, indicating there is still a supply opportunity to provide more diverse products.
“This is the early innings of a much bigger convergence between sports, fashion and lifestyle, and the popularity of women’s sports is the leading indicator,” Grazioli-Venier told Glossy. “If 78% of female fans say they’d buy more with better merchandise, and their top priorities are comfort, style and price, this tells you that it must go beyond slapping a logo on a men’s template and calling it ‘women’s.’ Women’s sports merchandise must be treated as a true fashion category, and with increasing demand, it will become one that will continue to professionalize.”
Additionally, licensing apparel deals come with their own pitfalls. Several brands that make licensed apparel told Glossy that licensing for an entire sports league is like collaborating with 32 different brands at once.
“The leagues will tell you they have complete control and approval rights over all team marks and licensing but, like every other licensing business I know, there have been times where a team doesn’t approve of something, or they have a slightly different vision,” said Picca. “It’s inevitable, and we never want to upset anybody. But ultimately, it’s up to the leagues for final approval.”
Stat of the week
Shopping malls are making a comeback, according to January 2026 data from the analytics company Placer.ai. During the month, foot traffic was up 4.5% at indoor malls, 6.2% at open-air shopping centers and 3.6% at outlet malls.
News to know
- Prada confirmed on Thursday that Pieter Mulier will be the new creative director of Versace. He joins after the previous creative director, Dario Vitale, left in December following a startlingly short run leading the house.
- The French fashion resale company Vestiaire Collective is expected to make its first annual profit this year, the company said on Thursday.
- Ralph Lauren continues to be a stock to watch, with a 10% year-over-year increase in revenue reported this week. It’s a slight slowdown, but continues three quarters of double-digit sales growth. The brand also recently reached fourth place on Lyst’s quarterly index of the hottest fashion brands.
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