Yoon Ahn’s Historic Nike X NBA Collection Is Inspired By ’90s Hip-Hop Queens

American sports were turned upside down this year. The pandemic caused season delays and cancellations, and for the athletes that did get to play, most did so without any fans. At NBA games, there were often digital renderings or cardboard cutouts of fans in the condensed stands, but the locals cheering on their hoops heroes and jeering the visitors were gone.

If you’re more of a fashion fan than a b-ball fanatic, then you might’ve been missing the NBA’s courtside style. There were no Rihanna, Beyoncé, or Kardashian sightings at games this year. The only real sports-world swagger came by way of the players themselves, wearing Gucci hoodies and carrying Louis Vuitton bags on their way into or out of the locker room, and the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s, as seen in The Last Dance.

Ambush designer and Dior Men director of jewellery Yoon Ahn began to nurture her love of basketball a year ago when she started to design a new women’s capsule collection for Nike in partnership with the NBA. The line features parkas, track pants, fitted jersey tops, sports bras, and high-top sneakers, as well as logo-branded basketballs. The footwear will be released this Friday, while the apparel will follow on 22 December, and all will be available on the Snkrs app and through select retailers. The two teams represented in the collection are the Brooklyn Nets and the LA Lakers, highlighting the legendary East Coast versus West Coast rivalry.

The designs, according to Ahn, are inspired by women’s style in the ’90s, particularly in the world of hip-hop, when female musicians and rappers often mixed baggier menswear with their own more feminine pieces. Of course, modern-day courtside style à la Bey and Rihanna was a huge influence too. Empowerment is the key to the collection, which the designer emphasized over the phone from Tokyo. Ahn is the first woman to design a female-focused collection alongside Nike and the NBA.

“It’s about making girls feel proud without them having to compromise their style,” Ahn explained, pointing out that the vast majority of stylish sports merch is geared toward and made for men. “As a female designer, I know how it feels to wear clothes, and I was thinking about how I like to mix and match different fits and styles. I thought about how we can make these jerseys and warm-up pants and the fits work on a female body.” Ahn was struck by how many women in the ’90s wore “oversized, baggy stuff but made it look very feminine. I was inspired by that attitude of owning a men’s piece by kind of pulling in your own style instead of the clothes wearing you.”

Nike and Ahn decided that she would be the one to star in the collaboration’s campaign. The collection, she says, “is simple enough so that everyone can use the pieces to extend their self-expression when they go to the games.” Ahn is hopeful that, at some point next year, fans will return to the games, and when they do, she’s ready to dress them.

“When I first went to Portland to discuss the collection with Nike, we were doing the design session and we kept having conversations about the fact that there are so many female basketball fans who go to the games but they feel like there’s not enough team apparel that they can wear,” she notes. “So we asked, What can we do to help the female fans of basketball without compromising their style and make sure they still have fun representing their favorite teams?”

Ahn admits that she wasn’t a basketball fan before taking on this design project, but she watched games from Japan and became captivated by The Last Dance. The Nike x Ambush NBA collection is a mash-up of two different worlds that, oddly enough, do have a lot in common. “The courtside,” Ahn said, “is just like the front row in a fashion show. Right?”