Inside the commercial impact of athlete styling

Your Women's Sports Business Digest

November 11, 2025

While actors promote films twice a year, athletes appear in front of cameras nearly every day during their seasons. Every tunnel walk. Every press conference. Every game.

Forward-thinkers saw that athletes had something celebrities couldn't offer: frequency.

Fashion designer houses dressing celebrities for award shows created a marketing model of lend a dress, capture a moment, and generate press coverage–a playbook leaned on for decades.

But now, Fashion partnerships with female athletes generate consistent content streams that traditional celebrity collaboration models simply can't match.

Celebrity stylist Jasmine Caccamo has spent her career betting on the power of athletes. She's watched fashion's perception of athletes evolve from resistant to actively pursuing partnerships.

Today we break down exactly how strategic styling creates measurable commercial returns for both athletes and brands.

🤿 Below the Surface

Here's what's on deck this week:

  • Signal Strength: Why athlete styling is a wave you don’t want to miss

  • In the Current: Investment and airtime signal women's sports' commercial momentum

  • Blue Zone: Deep Blue’s NHRA x Las Vegas Aces crossover

  • Shark Bite: DiJonai Carrington at the ESPN W Summit

⚡️ Signal Strength  

Threading the Needle Between Sports and Style

Jasmine Caccamo has styled many of the celebs and athletes you know and love from Mikaela Shiffrin and Carmelo Anthony to Taylor Swift and Camilla Cabello. As fashion becomes synonymous with personal branding, Caccamo is a prime example of how brands can capture the opportunity fashion has with women’s sports. 

By the numbers:

  • 15+ years in fashion, with 9+ years specializing in athlete styling

  • 12-year partnership with Alex Morgan showing sustained commercial value

  • Women's sports merchandise market grew to $6 billion creating new partnership opportunities

  • Dior named 15 female athletes as brand ambassadors for Paris 2024, including Alex Morgan

  • Apparel brand Vuori, valued at $5.5 billion, prioritizing multiple athlete partnerships

What they're saying: "Celebrities would only do these press events when they were promoting a movie or a TV show, whereas athletes have games every single week. So they're literally on this 'runway' every week, being able to showcase designers and brands." — Jasmine Caccamo

How it works: Strategic athlete styling operates on four principles that beat out traditional celebrity partnerships on many fronts:

  1. Frequency advantage:  Athletes create brand visibility through their seasons and press events instead of isolated celebrity moments

  2. Authentic integration: Personality-driven fashion creates natural partnerships. Alex Morgan's portfolio grew from soccer endorsements to include JPMorganChase, lifestyle brands, and Dior.

  3. Long-term relationship value: Long-term partnerships create authentic brand representation. Jasmine's 12 years with Alex Morgan demonstrates how understanding personality and style generates genuine content.

  4. Innovation of monetization model: League One Volleyball's partnership with REVOLVE exemplifies new commercial pipelines—athletes wear branded pieces for tunnel walks, content posts to social channels, products become immediately shoppable.

Why it matters: Fashion houses resisted athlete partnerships for years due to body type considerations and outdated assumptions that uniform-wearing athletes didn't care about fashion. Alex Morgan's expansion from soccer sponsors to JPMorganChase and Dior, League One Volleyball's shoppable REVOLVE tunnel walks, and increased athlete partnerships prioritization among big brands are all pointing to the commercial case women’s sports and fashion present at this moment. 

The sports sponsorship market is projected to grow from $63 billion in 2021 to $109 billion by 2030. Athlete styling captures that growth by turning near-daily visibility into sustained commercial value.

📰 In the Current  

We monitor the current so you can ride the wave. Here's what you need to know this week:

🦈 Blue Zone  

Deep Blue facilitated a women’s sports crossover between motorsports and basketball, featuring the NHRA & Las Vegas Aces. The Aces Chelsea Gray and NHRA Top Fuel driver Maddi Gordon linked up for a jersey swap at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway while 2025 WNBA Champion, Gray, experienced the power of the starting line and the driver’s seat for the first time at the track.

On Location
Deep Blue will be on the ground at the 2025 NWSL Championship in San Jose later this month. Interested in meeting up, email Meg Roxas, Partnerships Director: [email protected]

Tune In
Check out the latest episode of Courtside with Laura Correnti featuring Mike Nichols, Chief of Sponsorships Strategy & Activation at Group 1001 (Gainbridge) on the brand’s approach to their women’s sports investments and partnerships, including becoming the presenting partner of the Gainbridge USL Super League. Listen here.

🌊 Shark Bite

“I truly am a believer of look good, feel good. Feel good, play good. Play good, pay good.”
– DiJonai Carrington, on stage at the ESPN W Summit in Ojai, California 

The fashion industry spent decades perfecting celebrity partnership models. Athletes are rewriting those playbooks with the unique advantages they bring: frequency, authenticity, and year-round engagement.

Keep building partnerships that match market momentum.

– Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment

Interested in learning what Deep Blue is up to? Have an idea? 
Reach us at [email protected].