OPINION:
Bethan Holt is a fashion director and writer for the Daily Telegraph.
The new men’s 100m gold medallist has turned the athletics track into a catwalk with a natural charisma that thrives on TikTok.
The day after winning the gold medal in the men’s 100m race at the Paris Games, Noah Lyles set his sights not on more titles and records but on a more fashion-oriented goal; having a pair of trainers named after himself. “I want my own shoe. I want my own trainer. Dead serious,” he told reporters. Not a trainer for fellow athletes to run in, he emphasised, but a shoe with the same legendary potential as an Adidas Stan Smith (named after the former US tennis champion) or Nike’s Air Jordan (the namesake of basketball player Michael Jordan).
It’s a testament to just how seriously Lyles takes the reputation he’s honed as a fashion star who also happens to be a world-class sprinter. “The most important thing is running fast but it is cool to run fast and look good,” Usain Bolt once said. Now Lyles is reinventing what it means to look good as an athlete. It goes far beyond having the snazziest tracksuit in the line-up: he’s got the fashion world at his feet.
Most athletes populate their Instagram feed with slightly dull training updates but you could be excused for landing on Lyles’ page and assuming you were scrolling through photos posted by the latest big fashion influencer. His birthday last month was marked with a photoshoot at London’s Barbican for which he wore a Louis Vuitton shirt, his nails emblazoned with the word “icon”. Earlier in the summer, he posed alongside Snoop Dogg wearing a sharp Gucci x Adidas suit with Dr Martens loafers and Fendi sunglasses.
“Noah’s style is completely representative of who he is,” says Maya Bruney, the photographer behind that Barbican shoot and the founder of Track and Fits, a platform that promotes the synergy between athletics and fashion. “Just as he is on the track, with fashion he’s a rule breaker, he’s very confident and he doesn’t care what other people think. He personifies this new movement of personal style, he paints his nails and does what he likes which is quite something in a world full of traditionalists.”
While track and field athletes have a long-held heritage of promoting trainers and tracksuits, it’s rare to see them sporting anything else. This is where Lyles breaks the mould; “I told him ‘please don’t wear trainers, be yourself, wear what you really like’,” says Bruney. Lyles happily obliged. “He has received negative messages about the way he dresses but he rises above it,” Bruney adds.
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Advertise with NZME.Indeed, he has completely embraced his bold and confident approach to fashion, introducing an entirely new element to athletics meetings. Since last year, Lyles has been emulating NBA and NFL players and their use of the stadium tunnel as a kind of catwalk. Working with his stylist Kwasi Kessie, Lyles now arrives for competitions not in standard kit but wearing carefully curated looks by a mix of major houses and under-the-radar designers, making what was once an unremarkable matter of routine into a fashion moment with viral potential. “He’s doubled his followers since he started doing walk-ins. It’s completely elevated his personal brand,” says Bruney.
Elsewhere, Lyles has defied our usual expectation of athletics, too. He’s recently begun wearing pearls in his hair — an unexpectedly delicate antidote to the strength and power required from sprinters at the top of their game. For the premiere of the Netflix documentary series, Sprint, in which he stars, he wore head-to-toe white in reference to his pearl obsession — a look comprised of a sequinned jacket by Amiri, a pearl-embellished Simone Rocha shirt and Bode trousers. For an appearance on the Jimmy Fallon talk show, he opted for a leather jacket by the Parisian fashion house Celine with Saint Laurent trousers and a chunky pair of cowboy boots: not your classic running attire.
“He is just stylish,” Kessie recently told Women’s Wear Daily of his friend and client’s approach to fashion. “What I mean by that is that he doesn’t have one [style] like, ‘I’m going to be a rock star or I’m going to wear streetwear.’ It’s depending on the intention for the outfit and his energy that he wants to portray. For me, he’s just overall stylish. He doesn’t check one box. He has a keen knack for fashion and for style.”
Like most athletes at the top of their game, Lyles has already secured sponsorship deals with a major sportswear brand (Adidas) and a luxury watchmaker (Omega). Unlike many athletes, though, he even wore his Omega watch during the 100m final, flashing the £13,500 ($28,553) Speedmaster timepiece to the world as raced down the track at the Stade de France, a statement of his commitment to bringing his unique showman spin to his ambassadorship deals. But as Lyles stated in his post-race press conference, he’d like his Olympic gold to open many more fashion doors, just as Emma Raducanu’s 2021 US Open win led to deals with Dior and Tiffany that were inked within days of the final.
“Noah Lyles could easily become a hugely powerful brand ambassador for any business following the Olympics. Not just because of his achievement at the Games and how this will elevate his profile, but because he has a natural charisma that really comes through in social content,” says Sara McCorquodale, the founder of influencer intelligence agency Corq. “In luxury, this is often lacking. There is beauty, style and sometimes eccentricity, but not the kind of assured X-factor Lyles seems to have in buckets. For example, Burberry’s partnership with footballer Son Heung-Min is very interesting but we don’t really get a sense of his personality through his campaigns. A talent like Lyles is an incredible partner for a luxury brand in the TikTok age.”
Through his partnership with Kessie, Lyles has created a look that effortlessly blends big design houses and lesser-known brands — this should have huge appeal to luxury houses in search of cool factor. “I’m sure Lyles will have his pick of brands after the Games, but I would love to see a big global collaboration with Prada,” says McCorquodale. “He would bring such a freshness and relevance as well as offering a new spin on styling.”
Could next year’s big trainer be the Prada Lyles? Watch this space.
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