But the presence of fashion at the games, and more specifically LVMH, quickly turned commercial, harsh; into a celebration not of craftsmanship but of brands.
The night before the Opening Ceremonies, Arnault hosted a party at his museum, Fondation Louis Vuitton, where guests such as LeBron James, Jelena Djokovic (the wife of Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic), Angel Reese, Naomi Osaka and many other athletes wore clothes with visible LVMH logos. Several wore unsplashy clothes with Louis Vuitton bags in their hands. The public temperature on designer goods tends to ebb and flow. At the moment, as global inequality is so intense and the prices of luxury brands rise, it seems as if there couldn’t be anything cornier than a designer bag or label.
What excites people about clothes right now is not fashion, but style. What has made NBA and now WNBA tunnel style so compelling is the sense that the players are crafting their own looks. They may use stylists, but you know they have a relationship to what they’re wearing that is not monetary. Several designers worn by WNBA players have told me they had no idea players were wearing their clothes.
Louis Vuitton, LVMH’s biggest label, designed the cases for the medals and torches; the LVMH tailoring house Berluti made the French Opening Ceremonies uniforms; jeweler Chaumet designed the medals. Moet would be on hand for victorious moments; Sephora sponsored the torch relays. There is always some branding; Ralph Lauren did the uniforms for the United States, for example, as it has for several Olympic Games now. But this year it feels as though the sponsors have turned every moment into a collaboration.
During the Opening Ceremonies, I received dozens of press blasts from brands: Lady Gaga was wearing Dior. Jessica Chastain in Ralph Lauren. Ariana Grande in Thom Browne. Cynthia Erivo in Roberto Coin. LVMH made the uniforms for the volunteer medal bearers! Dior by Maria Grazia Chiuri dressed some choristers!
Look, I get it: getting dressed by a fashion brand is lucrative. Most celebrities, a category that includes Olympics, are not wearing clothes simply because they like them. And yes, fashion is a national treasure in France, so the Opening Ceremonies’ whimsical displays of the Moulin Rouge women in pink dancing the cancan, or the exuberant (if aesthetically tacky) runway show were, yes, charming.
But the problem wasn’t the combination of celebrity and sports — it was the ubiquity of labels. During the Opening Ceremonies on Friday the masked torchbearer, in a tattered tailcoat, leaped into a room meant to be the Louis Vuitton atelier. The camera skimmed joyfully over workers carefully stitching the coated canvas and leather, stamped with its monogram that graces many of its handbags and accessories. It read like an awkwardly sentimental ad for something that, at least right now, feels slightly distasteful.
Each time the camera cut to French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, you could see not the French swimmer Laure Manaudou but the belt she was wearing, which read in blaring letters, “ALEXANDER WANG.”
Maybe this is the way the world felt when sports stadiums with historic names were torn down and replaced by spaces named things like “Smoothie King Center.”
All this creates an aura of crassness where there should be joy, ideally beauty, and even a touch of sentimentality.
Which is what made the appearance of athletes in their native dress unusually moving this year. There are always teams that opt to wear clothing that have some traditional tie to their country as a source of national pride.
But seeing the Ghanaians in their blue stripes and hats, Indians in their rich pastel prints and Haitians’ textured pants and skirts was a pointed reminder in a city that thinks of clothing as its native language, that often has a sense of superiority about its sartorial creations, that many people around the world have something interesting to say with clothes.
Especially meaningful were uniforms that updated traditional clothing — which brought their country’s history into the present. Mongolia’s deep cornflower blue and red tunics, designed by the fashion label Michel & Amazonka, were based on the deel, a wrapped overcoat often worn by herders, and decorated with Olympic and Mongolian imagery.
Liberia’s ensembles were made for the second Summer Olympics in a row by Liberian American designer Telfar Clemens, whose tote bag, nicknamed the “Bushwick Birkin,” is the viral and affordable it-bag beloved by Gen Z and millennials. Rather than look to their past, this was a country from which a designer fled to escape civil war, now embracing his off-piste genius as one of their native sons. This is how clothing creates meaning.
Because, of course clothing is not only fashion. The joy of those cancan dancers in pink, or Lady Gaga shimmying in ostrich feathers and a Dior feather hat, was a valiant tribute to French tradition.
But fashion can also be conservative, closed-off. It can be pointlessly snobby, too attached to tradition and authority figures. Most of all, it has a long history of exclusion, even in the midst of borrowing from cultures it otherwise looks down upon.
To see people from around the world in their full expressive flower — even just a hat or scarf with a colorful blazer — showed the best of the Olympics, a celebration of the truth that style and self-expression are often the richest stories.
