Last year, Mike Amiri, the designer whose opulently ripped men’s skinny jeans launched a thousand Instagram posts (and his business), encountered the football effect for the first time.
Barcelona Football Club, the Spanish football team that has won the Champions League five times and is contributing 16 players to various World Cup teams, announced that Amiri would be its official formal wear partner for the next five years.
The result, Amiri said, left the Bieber effect in the shade.
It trumped the Maluma effect and the Teyana Taylor effect – the effect of pretty much any of the celebrities who wear his label.
“That post got, like, 250 million impressions,” Amiri said. “We were a niche Los Angeles brand, doing shows in Paris, and then all of a sudden we became global.”
When the team started deplaning in his suits, people began showing up in his stores with screen shots and pages ripped from newspapers, asking for the same styles.
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“Internationally, soccer (as the sport is called in the US) is just another level,” he said. “It’s like a different language.”
It is one that everyone will soon encounter thanks to the World Cup, which starts this week.
And as fashion wises up to the ways the sport can take them… well, everywhere – Loewe is dressing the Spanish team, Louis Vuitton is making the trophy cases, and Nike is collaborating with Jacquemus on the French team’s jerseys – Amiri may be a case study in what happens next.
“He saw the importance of the tunnel and making clothes that fit athletes before anybody else,” said Karla Welch, a stylist who works with Kelsey Plum of the Los Angeles Sparks and tennis star Aryna Sabalenka.
That was back in 2014, when Amiri was an ex-music producer, songwriter and law school graduate hanging around the garment district of Los Angeles and DIYing clothes in an office underneath a Thai restaurant.
“I would look at guys at basketball games, and the guys on the front row would always have US$1,000 (approximately RM4,055) shoes – Louis Vuittons or red bottom sneakers,” Amiri said.
He was standing in his VIP fitting area (honestly, it’s more like a house) on South Rodeo Drive, a cream-and-wood-toned space that resembles nothing so much as a five-star hotel.
“They’d have snake-billed hats by Don C, which are, like, US$1,100 (RM4,460),” he said. “They’d have some crazy jacket, some crazy watch. But no one was doing luxury denim that symbolised that same sort of status or curation.”
So he did.
Maxfield picked him up.
Within two weeks Mick Jagger had bought a piece. Odell Beckham Jr, the Giants‘ wide receiver, followed, and in 2016 Beckham suggested that Amiri be his date for the ESPY Awards show “and walk the red carpet, like they do at the Met Gala”, Amiri said.
A decade later, he is doing more than US$300mil (RM1.2bil) a year in revenue; has 31 stores with six more opening this year; a 100,000-square-foot campus of assorted old steel warehouses in downtown Los Angeles; 400 employees; and one minority investor: Renzo Rosso, the founder of OTB Group, which owns Diesel and Maison Margiela.
Even though Amiri, 49, has no formal fashion education and has what he categorised as among “the most CFDA losses ever” – he has been nominated six times for the US fashion awards and never won – he has learned to heed what his friend Virgil Abloh told him when he was depressed about his losing streak: “Our work is measured in the streets and people’s closets.”
“One of my first fashion reviews in Paris was kind of negative,” Amiri said.
It criticised him for treating the Paris runway like an NBA tunnel walk.
“I was like, ‘But NBA tunnels are awesome!’” he said. “Getting a stamp of approval from the old guard is cute, but the culture has to give you a stamp of approval.”
For him, increasingly, sports is the culture.
The Kelce stamp of approval
The athlete thing happened, Amiri said, somewhat by accident. Because his early skinny jeans came with a bit of stretch and had long inseams so they would bunch around the calves, they tended to fit people with atypical bodies.
“Amiri was one of the first brands I gravitated toward because the clothes worked with my body rather than against it,” said Kyle Kuzma of the Milwaukee Bucks.
Amiri’s aesthetic, which is sort of old-Sunset-Strip-meets-Casino, also worked for Kuzma. His favourite look – a sparkling fringed set he wore for a season opener’s tunnel walk.
Paul Pogba, the Monaco midfielder, was another early adopter.
“My first piece of Amiri was a pair of jeans, all black, ripped, with python,” he said. “They were fire. Very, very soft. Now if I want to go out to an event or red carpet, I wear Amiri.”
“Athletes like a little flash,” Welch said.
The Amiri clothes, she said, “are very rock star and very LA (Los ANgeles) in the best way possible: like an iteration on Dickie pants, but in beautiful suiting fabric”.
Athletes also appreciated the idea that a designer might be interested in them in the first place.
Even a decade ago, fashion largely ignored sports stars in favour of traditional red carpet celebrities.
“They would be happy to get an invite to the runway shows and get dressed,” Amiri said. “Then they became friends because I was their inside guy.”
When Neymar, the Brazilian football star, is around, the two men trade jerseys.
Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United forward who was on loan to Barcelona last season, called Amiri’s son on his last birthday and left a voicemail message (his son thought it was a joke).
He met Travis Kelce in Las Vegas at a club, and they bonded while hanging out behind a DJ booth.
Since then, Kelce has worn Amiri numerous times, including for his 2024 and 2025 Super Bowl tunnel walks. He may be wearing Amiri this week to accompany Taylor Swift to her Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony: a pinstriped Tony Montana as Dean Martin-style suit.
“He’ll pick the most 70s fitting suit,” Amiri said of Kelce’s taste.
“He’s not scared. My kids will come down and say, ‘Dad, he’s getting roasted on social,’ and Travis is like: ‘It’s good. It’s good. It’s everywhere.’”
See his 2025 Super Bowl outfit, a burgundy number that was widely mocked for its 1970s pimp vibe.
For his part, Kelce said he likes the “sophistication and individuality” of Amiri’s clothes. And that the designer seems “to have so much fun with it”.
The relationship with athletes has become “like a superpower”, Amiri said. “These guys are wearing Amiri to the game, outside of the game, in the club. It’s being lived in, in a really organic way.”
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‘We’re going to sell a lot of suits’
When Barcelona first approached him, Amiri said he was surprised because generally these sponsorships involve a brand not only making clothes for free (or in exchange for free publicity), but also paying for the chance to work with a team.
Amiri, while successful, was not in a position to do that.
“That’s a level of sponsorship usually limited to a different size company,” he said.
But the team owners had seen the players themselves wearing the label.
“Instead of signing a contract with a massive luxury brand that’s going to pay a crazy amount of money, they thought, ‘We just want to dress them in what they want to wear,’” Amiri said.
Amiri’s Barcelona contract is for both the men’s and women’s teams, and he has a new division in the company devoted to the team.
For Winter 2025, the first season, the clothes took the form of double-breasted navy pinstriped suiting, red and blue rep ties (with a cursive “Amiri” scrawled between the stripes) and a mid-length wool overcoat that Manel Del Río, Barca’s managing director, said was his favourite piece.
For fall, the team is getting brown leather bombers, grey pinstriped suits, ribbed knit dark gray polo shirts and claret ties.
The idea was to be a “little Peaky Blinders-ish in a swaggier way”, Amiri said. “Not so conservative.”
Amiri is testing the market with womenswear and childrenswear, and fragrance is next.
And he’s not stopping at football. He has worked with Formula One drivers Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, as well as WNBA star Caitlin Clark and sprinter Noah Lyles. He also has designs on tennis. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
