Did You Know The NFL Has A Fashion Editor?

Meet the NFL’s most valuable, in vogue player: fashion editor Kyle Smith. As the world tunes in to the 59th Superbowl, the creative explains what his role means for American football and the world of fashion.

Growing up, Kyle Smith did not like sports.

“I was scared of the boys in sports,” said Smith, 31, who is gay. He described himself as the type of teen who was way more interested in watching The September Issue, the documentary about the inner workings of Vogue.

Smith, who was born in Connecticut and raised in Los Angeles, was reflecting on his teenage years over coffee last month at the Hotel Alfred Sommier in Paris. He was in town attending the menswear shows for the first time since being named the first-ever fashion editor of the NFL.

He started the job last fall with a directive to use fashion and style to reach new audiences through the league’s media platforms. Smith works with athletes to create and share content – photos or videos of them showcasing their off-duty style at events like men’s fashion week – and helps players and teams build relationships with traditional fashion media brands like GQ and Vogue.

At Super Bowl LIX, he will be part of a team covering what players and other notable attendees wear to the game during a new red-carpet segment that will air as part of the streamer Tubi’s Super Bowl broadcast. When he is not travelling, Smith, who still lives in Los Angeles, works mostly at the NFL’s West Coast office next to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.

While the NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS have also been focusing more attention on athletes’ style as the industries of fashion and sports have become more intertwined, those leagues have yet to underscore that focus by creating a job with the word “fashion” in its title.

Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social, influencer and content marketing, described Smith’s role as that of a consultant “for players, and then ultimately the league, in terms of how we’re showing up in different moments”.

Though his fashion editor role is new to the NFL, Smith is not. He has worked in different capacities for the league and its associated entities on and off for about six years, including as a stylist to players who have hired him on their own.

He is currently styling Joe Burrow, the Cincinnati Bengals’ quarterback, who did not attend the men’s shows in Paris because he had instead gone to the Australian Open in Melbourne. Smith said he helped Burrow choose clothes to bring to the tennis tournament, travelling to Burrow’s home in Ohio with four suitcases full of options.

Pivotal to Smith becoming the NFL’s fashion editor was his involvement in getting Burrow and Justin Jefferson, a Minnesota Vikings wide receiver, to participate in Vogue World, a fashion show on steroids, in Paris last summer, Trombetta explained.

“The Paris moment was a way for us to sort of recalibrate what Kyle was doing and formalise some things,” he said, citing a growing desire among NFL players, whose teams sometimes set dress guidelines for off-field appearances, to tell stories through clothes. “Some of them may have really big personalities, and some may actually be a little bit on the shy side, and fashion is their way of expressing themselves.”

Smith had previously spent more than two years working as a social media programmer for the NFL, a job in which he helped broaden the fashion content posted to the @nfl and @nflstyle Instagram accounts (he still oversees @nflstyle). He also cultivated relationships with clotheshorse athletes: Smith recalled taking some dozen Cleveland Browns players shopping on Rodeo Drive, for example, while the team was in Los Angeles for a game.

He got his first job with the league in 2019: after internships with celebrity stylist Karla Welch and the brand Amiri, Smith was hired as a wardrobe assistant for the NFL Network. He remembered receiving a callback for the job while driving to a Costco with his father, and joking with him about the irony of the situation given Smith’s past feelings about sports. “‘Wouldn’t that be so funny?’” he recalled asking his father.

Smith said he applied to the job mainly because it was a chance to pursue work as a stylist, but also because his internships had opened his mind to bringing his interest in fashion to an industry that the style world had yet to fully embrace. “Musicians and actors were covered, athletes needed the same thing,” he said.

“The anchors would say, ‘Here’s the 10th-best player in the league,’” Smith said. “They’d talk about his stats, and I would think, ‘Yes, but look at his outfit! Why aren’t they talking about that fit?’”

He and a fellow wardrobe assistant pitched NFL executives the idea to create an Instagram account documenting players’ style, which was accepted. That account is now defunct, but Smith said it got the attention of many players, who would reach out about posting photos of their outfits.

Marquez Valdes-Scantling, a wide receiver for the New Orleans Saints who has played in the NFL since 2018, said opportunities to showcase personal style were appealing to athletes like himself, who are on teams with as many as 53 players and seen mostly in uniforms that include helmets over their faces.

“We’re so interchangeable,” he said. “You get lost.”

This season, Valdes-Scantling’s schedule allowed him to go with Smith to the men’s fashion week in Paris – it was his first time at the shows. Last year, he founded Luxe Fashion Fest, an event in Tampa, Florida, where Valdes-Scantling lives, that focuses on emerging brands. (Its second instalment is being planned for April.)

On a Friday in late January, he and Smith visited the showroom of designer Colm Dillane, better known as KidSuper, so that Valdes-Scantling, 30, could try on some clothes. As a shirtless Valdes-Scantling slipped his toned and tattooed arms into a navy suit jacket with pale pink streaks, the men wondered what he should wear underneath.

“I could just wear no shirt,” Valdes-Scantling said.

“No shirt is very athlete!” Smith replied.

About 15 minutes later, Ogbo Okoronkwo, a defensive end for the Cleveland Browns, walked into the showroom. Okoronkwo, who had just been in Milan for the city’s menswear shows, said he started attending fashion weeks in Europe about five years ago. Since then, he added, his style had “shifted from streetwear to more tailored fits”.

He was drawn to a blazer, but Smith wondered about the sleeves. “It’s very slim,” he said. “Your arms wouldn’t fit.”

Smith had said earlier that he thought Okoronkwo was one of the best-dressed players on what he considered to be the most fashionable team in the NFL.

“You’d think it would be a New York or Los Angeles or maybe Miami team – it’s Cleveland,” he said, naming Denzel Ward, Grant Delpit and Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah, who is known for wearing traditional Ghanaian ensembles, as being among the Browns’ style-forward players

The day after Smith and the players had the fitting at KidSuper’s showroom, he met Valdes-Scantling and Okoronkwo for the designer’s nighttime runway show at the Parc de la Villette, a sprawling park at the northeastern edge of Paris.

Smith, who was wearing Maison Margiela Tabi boots, had to muscle his way through a crowd to get in. “Fashion is a sport!” he said.

After the show, Okoronkwo credited Smith for being “a bridge” to the fashion world – a world that Okoronkwo said he once viewed the same way Smith had seen the world of sports: not very welcoming.

“It was a problem before if you were into anything but grass, football and dirt,” Okoronkwo said. “But my love of fashion and photography only helps my game. It’s finally normal for football players to like fashion.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Chantel Tattoli

Photographs by: James Hill

©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES

More on sports and fashion

From a technical wear takeover to sportswear stylings.

From The Olympics To Gorpcore: How Sportswear Took Over Our Wardrobes (And Our Lives). From technical hiking gear to retro-sportswear reignited by breakdancing’s category debut at the Paris Olympics, our sportswear obsessions go beyond predictable activewear at brunch.

Vintage Football Jerseys Are In Hot Demand. Meet The Fans Selling Them. Vintage football jerseys have become a streetwear staple and a target of major investors. Rory Smith meets the keepers of the polyester treasures.

How To Style Sporty Separates For The Perfect High-Low Outfit. Tactile fabrics combined with something luxe — the best way to approach the assortment of technical sportswear right now is to elevate it to the next level.

Fifa Women’s World Cup 2023 Uniforms: What We Would Actually Wear. Supporting some dynamic sporting prowess on the field are some very cool kits.

Viva Street Style: On World Climbing Day Boulderers Look To Balance Function & Swagger. As a dexterous and distinctive sports scene celebrated World Climbing Day, award-winning photographer Dean Purcell teamed up with writer Madeleine Crutchley to document the sporty stylings of boulderers in Tāmaki Makaurau.