Mamba power — with its chessboard strategies, gravity-defying stealth moves, Marvel Comics-levels of proprioception — played a role in most aspects of Kobe Bryant’s existence, so it is hardly surprising to learn that this also included fashion.
He understood fashion’s use as an instrument of image creation. Ever the student, Mr. Bryant applied that knowledge to style as craftily as he bent physics to his will on the court.
From a teenage prodigy with a goofball grin and a collection of oversize jerseys, Mr. Bryant assiduously transformed himself into a men’s wear paragon, a man who would eventually appear four times on the cover of GQ, whose Nike endorsement would be among the more lucrative in sports, whose forays into style went well beyond changing his jersey number from 8 to 24.
Long before N.B.A. players went from being physical oddities doomed to wear sack suits from Big & Tall shops to fashion darlings, Mr. Bryant was steadily forging an unlikely path for generations of athletes.
Now, of course, men like Russell Westbrook, LeBron James and Kelly Oubre Jr. embrace style so avidly that the stroll from tunnel to arena has become a pregame version of the Oscars red carpet. But it wasn’t always like that.
“As a young player, Kobe was predominantly donning more casual wear, active pieces, baggy sweatsuits and Michael Jordan Bulls jerseys,’’ said Jamaal Richards, whose Instagram account MoreThanStats is a mother lode of images documenting the transformation of athletes into fashion leaders. “As he grew as a player, a superstar and celebrity, he turned more toward sartorial elegance and sleek bespoke suiting. It was a natural progression for him since he always had that professional mind-state, that mamba mentality.”
Off court as well as on, Mr. Bryant was precise rather than flamboyant, cerebral, reading the public situations in which he increasingly found himself — from magazine photo shoots to red carpets — for their utility to him over the long term.
That there would not be a long term adds a dimension to the tragedy of his death, since the influence he wielded continued well after he retired from basketball. What he provided for his legions of fans, according to Mr. Richards, was a rare example of what a second act looks like for a professional athlete.
“Check his Instagram,” Mr. Richards said. “He was the perfect example of a professional, a businessman and entrepreneur, and his style really came to embody those key elements.”
While his athletic gifts were innate, his game was studied, and the same could be said of his approach to dressing.
“He loved clothes, but he’s competitive, he wants to learn from the experience,” said Jim Moore, the creative director at large of GQ. An image of Mr. Bryant appears on the back cover of “Hunks & Heroes,” a compilation of images from Mr. Moore’s four decades at the magazine.
“I was asked last week in Chicago who’s your favorite person you ever shot,” said Mr. Moore, who has outfitted Brad Pitt and Kanye West, along with just about everyone else. “My immediate reaction was Kobe Bryant.”
On photo shoots, Mr. Moore said, Mr. Bryant would turn up punctually and immediately disarm the crew by inquiring after their families and work lives. “He comes on set, remembers everybody’s name, has good manners, leaves everybody feeling good because he knows he has a huge influence and he knows his role as a hero.”
When it came time to shoot, Mr. Moore added, Mr. Bryant was “all focus.” Afterward he would take note of the clothes he’d been given to wear and say: “‘I love these suits. I really need to ramp up my style game.’”
This he did. Evolving away from the mom jeans and flowing Pat Riley-style Armani suits of his midcareer, Mr. Bryant adopted clothes of sleeker fit, wore spread-collar shirts and narrow-cut trousers that accentuated his elongated 6-foot-6 frame without exaggerating it. He began dressing for the post-retirement phase of his life and his role as a businessman and entrepreneur.
“Kobe’s proportions are different from most people,” Mr. Moore said of Mr. Bryant’s elongated arms and torso. “You can’t fake a 42 XL on him.”
To be sure, there were missteps, most notoriously a pictorial for The Los Angeles Times Magazine shot in 2016, the year Mr. Bryant brought his career to an end with a 60-point performance in the Lakers 101-96 victory over the Utah Jazz.
Titled “White Hot,” the story was photographed by Ruven Afanador and styled by James Valeri. In purely aesthetic terms, the feature was experimental and largely a success, with the world’s most famous basketball player reimagined in flowing all-white jersey and hoodies from designers including Damir Doma, Ann Demeulemeester and Kris Van Assche.
“The concept was about shooting everything in white,” Mr. Valeri said at the time. “That was Ruven’s idea. But I wanted to do something more modern and less conventional and less clichéd. It’s not like, ‘Let’s just put Kobe in a pair of pants and a shirt or in a suit.’”
Collective hoots of laughter greeted the results, with detractors heaping particular scorn on an image of Mr. Bryant in a bow tie and hat worn over a head scarf. The press characterized him variously as a “white-scrubbed spa victim,” a “doe-eyed Bedouin chief,” a combination of Tupac and Liberace.
Mr. Bryant quickly distanced himself from the shoot and course-corrected in a way that underscored what you would have to call his larger game plan.
“Other than on that shoot, we never again saw anything else of Kobe in the realm of the younger players displaying a flamboyant style,” Mr. Richards said. “His style from then on aligned with his vision.”
And what was that? “A textbook example of how a professional man should be dressing in his 40s.”
