Some people go to the Met Gala for the self-promotion. Some go because it’s the ultimate game of dress-up. But Dwyane Wade, the N.B.A. Hall of Famer turned game-show host, brand ambassador and philanthropist, went for something else.
He went for the market research.
See, this week, Mr. Wade will assume yet another role: the guest editor of Players, a new magazine from the publishing company of the former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, and the first dedicated solely to athletes and style. Or the style of athletes.
Forget the tunnel walk. Like the Met Gala, which was attended by more sports celebrities this year than ever before, including the co-chair and racecar driver Lewis Hamilton; the sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson; the W.N.B.A. players Angel Reese, Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart; and the N.F.L. quarterback Jalen Hurts, Players signals a new stage in the increasingly intertwined relationship of sports and fashion.
A biannual magazine, Players is the brainchild of Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, its editor in chief and the chief executive of CR Fashion Book Ltd., which publishes the namesake style magazine founded by his mother, Carine.
“At CR, we were giving an incredible platform to models, to singers, to actors,” Mr. Roitfeld said. “But, in my mind, athletes were even more interested in fashion than other celebrities. Actors, when they’re not on the screen, try to have a more discreet life. But for athletes, fashion has always been important in building an identity.”
He sensed opportunity — not just to make a magazine for fashion people, but for sports fans. Think of it as a haute version of athlete trading cards. That’s where Mr. Wade came in.
He is, Mr. Roitfeld said, “someone who really has a voice that speaks to the two industries.” He brought with him sports credibility and fashion credibility.
The first issue, the one curated by Mr. Wade, is dedicated to basketball and features 10 different cover models — among them, Cameron Brink, Jalen Green, Spike Lee, Jordan Clarkson, Giorgio Armani and Mr. Wade himself, all in fashion labels like Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Fear of God, photographed by names like Mario Sorrenti, Quil Lemons and Nick Knight.
The goal, Mr. Wade said, was to take athletes out of the arena and into the culturesphere, the better to bring their “personalities and characters to life.” And it was, he added, about time.
“You can’t think about fashion without thinking of athletes now,” he said, “but it wasn’t always that way. It took a while for the door to open for us.”
In many ways, working on Players was the culmination of work he had been doing since about 2008, when he first started to think that fashion might be useful in his life after basketball. That clothes could be a microphone of sorts, used for his own ends.
“Fashion is one place that can move culture forward,” Mr. Wade said.” There are not a lot of areas in life that have that kind of impact.”
Still, while he had role models — Pat Riley, Dennis Rodman, Allen Iverson — the fashion world seemed largely closed to him. “Athletes are very long, and we’re very gangly, and no one wanted to make special clothes for us at that time,” Mr. Wade said. “Plus, it was before social media really blew up, so fashion couldn’t see that someone like myself is walking in with an audience of 40 to 50 million people. They couldn’t tell if athletes really helped the fashion space or not.” It took him three years to meet Anna Wintour.
Knocking down the doors was a lot of work. “We had to sell ourselves,” he said. “We had to write, essentially, short stories about why we should be at a fashion show. ‘Hey, my name is Dwyane Wade. I would love to come to the Dsquared2 show.’”
It paid off. Fashion has become part of what Mr. Wade calls his “Chapter 3.” The transformation really started after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, when he purposefully wore a hoodie like the one the teenager had been wearing when he was shot to demonstrate solidarity. It was when Mr. Wade realized that clothing could be “bigger than just the newest thing. It could be a statement that allowed me to reach a lot of people I’d never been able to reach before,” he said.
For him, editing Players became both proof positive of how far things had come and a way to pay it forward to give current players a boost — not to mention an opportunity to nod to those who came before. (The Armani cover, for example, was done in honor of Pat Riley, the president of the Miami Heat whose penchant for Armani suits during his coaching days transformed the image of basketball in the 1990s.) Not that Mr. Wade does not think there is still a way to go.
“I think it’d be great for brands to collaborate more with athletes,” Mr. Wade said. “They collaborate with a lot of other celebrities, and I would love to have more athlete voices in fashion, not just showing up, but really having a big impact.”
As for Mr. Roitfeld, he sees the magazine as a platform that can spawn a host of brand extensions, including “fanzines” produced for different events.
One of the first covers features players from the New York Liberty. Their photo shoot will be reproduced as a broadsheet and handed out to fans at the opening game of the W.N.B.A. season on the May 17; the covers will be displayed on the Jumbotron. There are plans for a similar handout in coordination with Lacoste during the French Open and at Wimbledon. And plans are already in the works for a special soccer issue for next year, when the World Cup comes to North America.
As it happens, Mr. Roitfeld has noticed a difference between working with athletes and working with other celebrities. “We’ve received thank you notes from players and their teams about how excited and how happy they felt shooting the story,” Mr. Roitfeld said. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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