Beyond the Uniform: Strategic Styling as Commercial Infrastructure
How to create consistent commercial opportunities for brands and partnerships
With over 15 years in fashion and nine years specializing in athlete styling, Jasmine Caccamo has worked with everyone from Mikaela Shiffrin and Carmelo Anthony to Taylor Swift and Camilla Cabello. She has seen firsthand the power of fashion with soccer star Alex Morgan, her client of ten years, as her commercial portfolio has transformed from sport-specific endorsements to deals spanning JPMorgan, baby formula brands, and Dior.
As a former college soccer player herself, she understands what it's like to live in a uniform 95% of the time—and how powerful it feels to express your personality through fashion the other 5%. She subverts traditional celebrity partnership models by treating fashion as a key lever in brand building rather than a “nice to have.”.
While Jasmine saw this athlete-styling need back in 2015, the industry is catching up.
Today it’s hard to imagine sports and fashion siloed, with constant partnerships emerging at the intersection, like Angel Reese joining forces with Juicy Couture as their global ambassador and creative collaborator.
Both brands and athletes are recognizing the connection and opportunity – Reese told Vogue: "It's always been both: basketball and fashion. I was a fashion girlie from [a young age], always in my mom's closet, putting on her stuff. I liked to carry a purse. Hair done. I wanted to look put together. I still do."
It’s no longer possible to deny the magnitude of fashion’s importance in the sports world.
Key Takeaways
Strategic athlete styling creates commercial advantages through:
Consistent near-daily content opportunities that other fields cannot match
Authentic brand partnerships emerging from personality-driven fashion choices rather than forced campaign messaging
Year-round revenue diversification beyond sport-specific endorsements into fashion, beauty, and lifestyle categories
The uphill battle for recognition
Valued at $5.5 billion, apparel brand Vuori has leaned into athletic partnerships in tennis, the NFL, and even collegiate athletics with their recent signing of LSU’s Livvy Dunne. In that same lane, jewelry brand Gorjana has tapped into tennis and the WNBA, partnering with Jessie Pegula and Cameron Brink respectively.
While partnerships like these are increasing, for so long female athletes across all sports remained largely excluded from fashion's ecosystem. Many established fashion houses resisted athlete partnerships due to outdated perceptions about commercial value and brand alignment.
Jasmine experienced this resistance firsthand when Alex Morgan wanted to expand her fashion presence, and still sees some of that pushback today with others. "Alex Morgan and Serena Williams and Venus Williams; these athletes were really the start of this fashion movement amongst women,” she says. “But there still are a lot of designers that have yet to see the value in dressing athletes. They don't see how an athlete is its brand, and how athletes are now celebrities in their own rights. There’s still a little bit of an uphill battle with getting designers to loan to certain clients."
Beyond designer reluctance, traditional celebrity styling operates on project-based budgets with sample-size clothing and established designer relationships. The body type diversity among athletes also demands extensive tailoring.
"People don't realize that athletes' body types are also a huge factor that you have to think about. They're not sample size, they're not size zeros that are walking down a runway, so there's a lot of tailoring involved,” says Jasmine.
None of this has stopped fashion’s momentum—they've just made the wins more meaningful. For Jasmine and stylists like her, the extra tailoring appointments and designer conversations are worth it when athletes finally get to show the world who they are beyond the jersey.
From wardrobe pulls to proactive storytelling
Jasmine's take on styling turns picking outfits on a whim into a proactive brand building move. With Alex Morgan, she established a relationship where monthly event calendars drive strategic planning across everything from commercials to speaking events to personal appearances.
It took years for Jasmine and Alex Morgan to refine this process together. But that investment pays off—long-term partnerships create authentic brand representation and make collaboration easier. New styling relationships need time to develop, but the efficiency gained makes that patience worthwhile.
Now, when working with athletes over multiple seasons, such as her exclusive styling of Hilary Knight, Jasmine creates narrative arcs rather than treating each appearance in isolation. For tunnel walks spanning 30+ games in the PWHL season, the process involves building seasonal stories that evolve from opening night to the playoffs, while still maintaining authentic personality alignment throughout.
"When you're putting together that many looks for an entire season, it's constant conversation and constant mood boarding,” says Jasmine. “I love to build and tell a story. I’ll see something is trending but then find a twist so it fits the athlete’s personality."
How styling creates measurable commercial returns
Partnership models continue to evolve and address the increasing synergy between sports and fashion, especially women’s sports. New research from Parity indicates that apparel has the highest sponsorship visibility among women’s sports viewers. If the consumers are tapped in, brands need to be, too.
REVOLVE and League One Volleyball's collaboration demonstrates how emerging women’s sports properties are primed for fashion investments, beyond the game time uniform Players dress in REVOLVE for tunnel walks, content gets posted on social channels, and products become immediately shoppable—creating monetization for all parties involved.
"They would post on their socials and make things available right away on REVOLVE. So you have the girls dressed in REVOLVE and it's immediately clickable. Monetization for everyone."
There’s an advantage in the frequency athlete fashion partnerships provide in comparison to traditional celebrity partnerships. "Celebrities would only do these press events when they were promoting a movie or a TV show, whereas athletes have games every single week,” says Caccamo. “So they're literally on this ‘runway’ every week, being able to showcase designers and brands."
What brands need to know before jumping in
While some brands are already collaborating with athletes, many are still sitting on the sidelines. Women's sports are growing fast, and the opportunity window is wide open. For brands considering their first athlete partnership or looking to strengthen existing ones, these four principles separate successful collaborations from failed experiments:
Think frequency, not just reach.
Athletes generate content every single week during their season through games and media appearances. This consistent visibility beats the one-off celebrity campaign that appears and disappears.
Authenticity isn’t optional.
"Their brand collaborations are truly authentic and organic to who they are. Their dressing is such a genuine extension of their personality that they start attracting those brands that truly resonate with who they are," Jasmine explains. Forced partnerships fail. Natural alignment wins.Give athletes creative input, not marching orders
"Most brands these days realize you're gonna get the best version of your talent if you let them wear what they want to wear. When you're on camera, if the talent is not feeling good, the commercial's not gonna look good." The best content happens when athletes feel confident in what they're wearing.Play the long game.
Quick campaign hits can work, but sustained partnerships create real value. Taking time to understand an athlete's personality, preferences, and style pays off for everyone involved.
Fit for the future
Major sporting events are naturally opening new doors for fashion partnerships. The Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, 2026 World Cup in North America, and Milan’s Winter Olympics give brands perfect moments to launch special collections and work with athletes while they’re on a world stage.
How we connect is also shifting the role fashion plays in sports. Caccamo notes that social media has “changed the game in so many ways…Gone are the days where you can double wear an outfit. Your look has to change all the time." What an athlete wears today is as impactful to their brand (and yours) as what they say or do.
Athlete styling means much more than choosing clothes. Brands exploring women's sports can build positioning in beauty, lifestyle, and apparel deals—not just athletic merchandise.
Beyond team jerseys and sneakers, athletes who develop distinct fashion identities attract partners in categories like wellness, home goods, and accessories—industries hungry for authentic voices that resonate with consumers. Their styling choices become the brand, generating revenue independent of their athletic contracts. And with games every week, brands get constant chances to show up.
