“DRESS good to look good. Look good to feel good. And feel good to run fast!”
American sprint queen Florence “Flo-Jo” Griffith Joyner – a student with designs on fashion from her Los Angeles public high school years – once famously expressed. Flo-Jo’s flamboyant looks – comprising flowing jet-black hair, glamorous makeup, and six-inch-long manicured nails complemented by jewellery and innovative redesigns of leotards and bodysuits which enhanced the “sports star/Barbie doll” spectacle of her athletic feats – were a precursor to how American and Jamaican track and field athletes, Sha’Carri Richardson and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce would come to present themselves in their own glorious epochs.
The “dress good” aspect could well had been sparked back in 1978 when Diane Katz, a BA graduate in Clothing Design for Apparel Manufacture who had contacted Nike co-founder Phil Knight with a suggestion that his brand needed clothing to go with its cool shoes, became the entity’s first apparel designer by starting out with the Windrunner – a hooded outerwear garment recognized by its distinct chevron, designed for use while running – after she had been tasked with responding to an athlete’s request for a jacket which would provide protection from the elements (mainly rain).
The proposition by Katz – who’d later originate the Air Jordan clothing line for Michael Jordan – would become the cue to a sporting revolution with a global reach which not only presents goddesses of victory, but also seeks to support a womanhood that is pluralistic.
Such information is contained in Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good – whose title is claimed to be synthesized from a quote by African American NFL player Deion Sanders (who may had lent and adopted it in his variated form from Griffith Joyner’s motto) – a tome which visualises the relationship between women and the garments they wear through five design archetypes from sporting history: warm-ups, jerseys, leggings, sport bras, and shorts.
Across more than 350 pages and 575 images, this unprecedented volume not only maps the development of women’s sports apparel but proves its potential, in whatever context, to make athletes who identify as women feel at their most powerful. Each chapter features interviews with Nike athletes, trainers, other collaborators, along with insightful texts from cultural commentators.
Athletes’ appearances feature prominently, with the evoking of Griffith Joyner’s 1988 100-meter world-record-setting sprint in a one-legged leotard, and Aborigine Australian athlete Cathy Freeman’s Swift Suit (referred to in news coverage as a “spacesuit”, and which she described as feeling “like you’re slicing through the air”) which she donned for her triumph in the 400-meter final at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Among twenty-two accounts from Nike athletes about what they wear to perform and their takes on the topic, I picked the contributions of track and field athletes, Richardson, Fraser-Pryce and Caster Semenya; tennis player Naomi Osaka; basketballer Dawn Staley and footballer Megan Rapinoe.
Richardson, an Olympics gold medallist who identifies as bisexual, had this to aver about nails: “My nails, you know, these are my babies. My hair as well. I feel like I got that from being around beautiful women all my life – and understanding that even if you can’t necessarily wear something different, you can still show that you are different. I feel like my nails do that, my hair do that. And my pretty face do it too. So if I’m going to look as fierce as I want to, I have to be able to put that performance on as well.”
Boasting a résumé which includes beating Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce in the 100-metres in a record time of 10.65 at the 2023 World Championships – she has stated that her style is inspired by Griffith Joyner’s. Fraser-Pryce, a double Olympics gold medallist and five-time world champion commented thus on her hair: “I hear a lot of, isn’t your hair too much when you’re running? When I look in the mirror and my hair is laid, it’s bright and colorful, I’m feeling at my best, and I perform at my best. My hair for me is a superpower. When you see off the track and my hair is black, it’s Shelly-Ann.
When I’m on the track and my hair is colored, with bows and ribbons, my nails are colored, that’s my alter ego. Every year when we have Jamaica Day here, the girls are wearing yellow and green braids and dressing up as Shelly-Ann.
You don’t have to question where I’m from when you see me.”
“Bury me in that bodysuit!” South Africa’s double Olympics gold medallist, Caster Semenya suggest she’d instruct about a favourite wardrobe item of hers when she dies – continuing thus regarding her accessories: “I cannot run without my chain. It gives me rhythm, because when I run it bounces up and down – bam, bam, bam, bam – and it sets the pace. I never forget my earrings, either. In my diamonds, I look cool. Because I’m a diamond, you know?”
A tableau of Semenya donning a Nike top, with a pendant of a carving of the African continent dangling around her neck, depicts her on a track during an IAAF Diamond League meet in 2019.
Haitian-American-Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka remarks thus regarding an iridescent
snakeskin look: “I’ve always felt like my personal style gives me power, like I can dress up and become a different person. I’ve always thought it would be beautiful to play in a reflective snakeskin outfit. Snakes can be seen as a bad omen, but some are reflective, some are beautiful. And they shed their skin.”
Born in Japan to a Haitian-American father and a Japanese mother, Osaka is a quadruple grand slam-winner who is also an activist who supports the Black Lives Matter movement.
While inadvertently exposing the shortcomings of the Nike designers of her era, ex-US basketball player Dawn Staley disclosed about the USA women’s basketball jersey: “The USA jersey was always too big for me. It never fit. When I am in the game, I want everything right. It’s got to look right.
It’s got to feel right.” A pioneer of the women’s game in the US, in 1995 Staley featured alongside fellow African American basketballers Sheryl Swoopes and Lisa Leslie in a Nike ad directed by Spike Lee, limning the trio dressed casually whilst walking on a Manhattan street enroute to playing against male players at a famous court – during a period when the future of women’ basketball in the US was uncertain.
The trio would embark on a multi-game exhibition tour which went on to not only dispel the ambiguity but galvanized the founding of the Women’s National Basketball Association in 1996 and culminated in the US Women’s Basketball Team claiming gold at the 1996
Atlanta Olympics!
Two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup-winning American soccer player, Megan Rapinoe, appears on the subject of collecting jerseys from fellow players. She is as renown for her crafty style of play – and her multi-hued dyed hair too – as she is for her off-the-pitch activism which include her advocacy for LGBTQIA+ issues, equal pay for the US Women National Team, inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, and end to homophobia and transphobia in sports.
Rapinoe garnered national attention for kneeling during the national anthem at an international match in September 2016 in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick (the San Francisco 49ers’ player who refused to stand during the US anthem to protest racial injustice and minority oppression).
She describes the moment of exchanging jerseys with an opposing player at the conclusion of the 2019 World Cup as “the opposite of a trophy of war, in a sense.”
The tome also enquires where and when has the athletic world crossed over with popular culture?
(Images of celebrities such as Princess Diana, Madonna, Missy Elliot, Mariah Carey, et al., in Nike apparel also appear.) The featured imagery spans reproductions of Nike’s trade catalogues that date back to the early 1980s, period and contemporary photography, sketches, advertisements, fabric swatches, seasonal colour palettes, original design proposals and patents, logos, product and campaign shots, and everything in between.
Author Maisie Skidmore is a London-based writer and editorial consultant.
She writes books about fashion, art, and design, and their intersection in contemporary culture. She collaborates with brands and cultural institutions to commission cohesive, impactful content.
A hardback, Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good is published by Phaidon and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R2400.
