Meet the Stylists Behind the WNBA’s Best-Dressed Players

The look, in all its bossed-up glory, spoke for itself: a leather suit with a cropped vest, oversize trousers, and square-toed boots made for stomping. Kelsey Plum, guard for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, walked the tunnel dressed to kill. It was championship ring night, and Plum and her teammates had come to claim what was rightfully theirs.

“Kelsey is just that b-i-t-c-h,” Sydney Bordonaro, Plum’s stylist, said of the viral look—a coy twist on the Princess Diana revenge dress and a subtle way for Plum to assert her dominance following a public divorce filing. That tunnel fit joined a rapidly expanding roster of styles worn by the current crop of WNBA stars, proving that the league is as fun to watch when the game clock is ticking as it is when the buzzer sounds. It’s A’ja Wilson in a custom yellow 813MinhLe suit with a split high-leg, a reference to her game-day signature style; it’s Caitlin Clark at the WNBA draft in satin Prada. It’s Angel Reese in seafoam-green feathered 16Arlington on the Met Gala carpet. It’s Natasha Cloud in a Phase varsity jacket, cuffed Dickies, and platform Doc Martens. The surge of attention paid to WNBA games has been matched by rising interest in how the players dress before and after the main event—and with every season, the style only gets better.

As an athlete, you never want to come to your next season looking the same as you did last year. You always want to step it up.”

“The bar has definitely been raised,” Amadi Brooks, stylist to WNBA players A’ja Wilson, Sydney Colson, Jackie Young, and Allisha Gray, says of the influence fashion is having on the WNBA and vice versa. “As an athlete, you never want to come to your next season looking the same as you did last year. You always want to step it up.” Brooks would know: She played D1 basketball, so she understands better than most how important the ritual of game day can be. She even wrote her master’s thesis on the psychological and physiological connections between looking and feeling good and playing well.

“If I’m going to a game, my sweatbands are matching my shoes, my laces are matching my headbands,” Brooks says. When she became a stylist to courtside reporters and WNBA stars, she was well aware that dressing the part was essential to feeling confident enough to bring home titles.

Angel Reese in 16Arlington at the 2024 Met Gala.

Young stars like Clark and Reese are drawing more attention to the league. And the style has ramped up along with them, perhaps amplified by the NIL era (in which college athletes are allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness) and the fact that it’s easier than ever to watch a game on television. According to Bordonaro, only a few years ago she was pleading with brands to dress her clients. Now, she says, the requests come in continuously: “I wake up, and my email is filled with new brands wanting to send things to players.”

It helps that there are dedicated fans cataloging the players’ every move. Christopher Ruff, who runs the Instagram account WNBA League Fits, was motivated to start the account in 2021 after realizing that other Instagram accounts weren’t featuring the WNBA players nearly as much as he believed they should. “My goal was to do anything to help get more eyes,” he says. “The page definitely did that. People would say, ‘Those players are stylish!’ And then some would even say, ‘I’m going to go check out the game tonight.’ ” Ruff believes that this shift in attention to the players’ style will only help achieve greater goals for the league, like higher salaries, better playing conditions, and more exclusive sponsorship deals, like Wilson’s with Nike, Candace Parker’s with Adidas, and the Skims campaign with the WNBA and NBA. “We always hear people talking about the money—how they’re not getting paid what they deserve, and that’s true. And so I was trying to figure out what I could do to help.”

As former basketball players, both Bordonaro and Brooks know the unique challenges of dressing athletic women who often tower over six feet. Brooks turns to brands that exclusively design clothes for taller women, like Nineth Closet and Model Atelier. “A lot of [these brands] are Black-owned, which I love as well,” Brooks says. “It’s tall, shapely Black women who are making these clothes that fit tall, shapely Black women.”

And while Clark’s Prada look was the first time the brand had dressed a WNBA or NBA player for a draft red carpet, Brooks insists that it will not be the last. “Prada dressed Caitlin for the draft. Angel just did a Good American campaign,” she says. “Little things like that show the growth that’s coming.”

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of ELLE.

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