THE FIT IS LIT

Sports and fashion are more intertwined than ever, with statement-making stars like JOE BURROW at the forefront of a movement where athletes are dominating our feeds and defining a new era of style influence

- by Nick Remsen

IT'S A MUGGY JUNE morning in Cincinnati. Canadian wildfire smoke hangs in the humid air like pulp in soft focus, and the nearby Ohio River moves at an almost imperceptible crawl. Despite it being sunny, the sky is white, not blue. Even the open, concrete-framed halls of Paycor Stadium are warm in the early hour. For the past three days, the Bengals have been holding a mandatory minicamp ahead of preseason, and as the team exits the field and heads to the locker room, some of the players bellow whoops into the heat of the arena's corridors: The camp has finished, and it's time to get back to summer break.

Joe Burrow, the Bengals' Pro Bowl quarterback, is the last guy to come through the tunnel. He stayed outside to put in a little more work. There's other media around, mostly tossing questions at coach Zac Taylor as to how minicamp has gone—or about the unresolved contract disputes between Bengals ownership and defensive ends Trey Hendrickson (who led the NFL in sacks last season) and Shemar Stewart, a rookie. Burrow sidesteps that pod and asks if I'd like to talk with him away from the fray, while... he's lifting?

The setting and setup are unconventional—but apropos, given our topics of conversation: style, Burrow's prominent embrace of it, and the way fashion has become more tightly entwined than ever with sports in recent years. Over the past half decade or so, these once-disparate worlds have been pulled together by a heavier, more urgent gravity—and Burrow stands as one of the highest-profile fixtures at the intersection. To a certain crowd, he might well be known more for his bold, fun, sometimes oddball outfits than for his arm. Here, inside the (much cooler) training facilities at Paycor, he's squat-pressing hundreds of pounds and still in his practice pinny, but talking about “Gucci fits” and “getting away from classic suits.” As far as sporting and sartorial spheres colliding goes, it doesn't get much closer than this.