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It’s Super Bowl week, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is taking an unconventional meeting — a huddle with Abercrombie & Fitch chief executive Fran Horowitz to put the finishing touches on the league’s fashion strategy.
Abercrombie’s multiyear partnership, announced last year, has become the cornerstone of a broader push by the NFL to lay claim to the coveted crossroads of fashion and sports. This year’s Super Bowl — by far the most watched broadcast every year — is now the proving ground, showing how far the league has moved beyond jersey and sideline merch and testing whether it can shape culture in the same way fashion does.
“We are putting increasing focus on the intersection between sports and fashion, because we think our fans care deeply about it, our players care deeply about it,” Goodell said alongside Horowitz on a Zoom call with The Business of Fashion. “It’s another way to engage our fans, not just here in the States, but also globally.”
As the intersection of fashion and sports heats up and more teams, leagues and brands pile in, Goodell painted a picture of an NFL growing increasingly disciplined about its collaboration playbook: start small, test the audience, then scale.
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Abercrombie’s partnership began three years ago with a licensing deal covering five teams. Now in its scale phase, the brand — the league’s “official fashion partner” — will sell merchandise for all 32 franchises and activate during Super Bowl weekend, including a pop-up at the NFL Shop in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The collection, priced from $45 to $150, includes Seahawks and Patriots tees and hoodies as well as Super Bowl LX fleeces and popovers for adults and kids.
The cherry on top is a splashy presentation on the eve of the main event: A fashion show, featuring some of the league’s biggest stars and an audience stacked with influencers — including players’ wives and girlfriends, or WAGS, a term Horowitz said the brand reimagined as “women achieving greatness,” a nod to their identities beyond the sidelines. It won’t be the only fashion show of the weekend: Thom Browne will unveil its fall 2026 collection at the GQ Bowl at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum on Feb. 6.
A world where a fashion brand is prioritised on the NFL’s biggest weekend would have felt unimaginable just a few years ago. But the move reflects a broader push to reach new and more global audiences as Gen Z reshapes how sports are watched and how fans participate in the culture around them, Goodell said. For Abercrombie, it marks a critical opportunity to step fully into its more inclusive era, moving beyond its teen-mall roots to court the 20-and-above customer, which Horowitz says now makes up the bulk of its base.
For a league of the NFL’s scale, future growth means meeting fans at intersections like music, art and, increasingly, fashion.
“This isn’t just for current fans, it’s for the future fans – that we can bring into the game and have them understand our players, our teams, our industry, in a different way than a three-hour game,” Goodell said.
Crafting Fashion’s Super Bowl Moment
Both Horowitz and Goodell were adamant that the lead-up to the Super Bowl fashion debut is the result of years of test and learn — and a full-fledged business strategy behind it.
For one, both organisations created dedicated teams to run the partnership. At the NFL, fashion director Kyle Smith is steering the “fashion” component alongside “a whole host of people both on the sponsorship partnership side to the licensing side,” Goodell said. At Abercrombie, Horowitz said it already had its merchandising and design teams in Columbus, Ohio in the mix to create licensing products, but that expanded in 2026 to a whole team, including marketers.
“We did have to put together an entire team to … work with the players, work with the styles, get the events coordinated,” Horowitz said.
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All of that will come together at the invite-only fashion presentation featuring NFL’s stars (and past Abercrombie collaborators) like Christian McCaffery and CeeDee Lamb on Feb. 7 in a mix of “vintage and modern styling” that took Abercrombie back into its 134-year-old archives to mix.
“The fashion show is how you put together a product for both the license program as well as the style,” Horowitz said. “Not everybody just wants to wear their football sweatshirt with a pair of jeans, but they actually want to put their whole look together.”
The tunnel walk — the moment players arrive at stadiums dressed for the cameras — has been the conceptual starting point for the NFL’s fashion journey, Goodell said. Abercrombie’s show will translate that ritual into a similar format, with the stage designed to mirror a stadium tunnel, Horowitz said.
Players’ wives and girlfriends will be in attendance, a detail both organisations framed as key to the strategy. As Goodell put it more bluntly: “[Players’] families and frequently their partners, are bigger stars than the players and bigger stars in the fashion world.”
That star power, they said, is meant to expand the league’s fashion story beyond male fans and bring more women (and international audiences) into the mix.
“There’s a huge female fandom for the NFL, and that was a big, big point for us,” Horowitz said. “Half of our business is female, and they are huge fans, and they love to show up and dress up and show their style while they’re watching the game as well.”
Time Will Tell
Even as the NFL eyes scale, how much fashion becomes a meaningful, direct revenue driver for the league remains an open question. For now, both sides are downplaying immediate sales in favour of the softer — and harder to measure — wins of emotional connection and brand awareness.
“We’re long-term thinkers – we’re not just about making a transaction,” Goodell said. “This is a deep partnership that we are looking to continue to build on, and that is going to be measured not just in sales, but in the emotional connection that we’re able to draw, our ability to bring new people into our game.”
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At Abercrombie, where the brand has spent the last several years remaking itself beyond its teen-mall past, Horowitz said awareness remains the top priority.
“We’ve been on an amazing journey for the past several years [but] there’s a lot of people who still don’t know our story or know about the new Abercrombie,” Horowitz said.
If it goes well, the brand will have a hard-to-beat moment in front of hundreds of millions of new and existing fans this weekend to make its case — and to do so as one of the only brands in the world that “gets to use” the iconic NFL shield, she said.
“That’s a very important asset,” Horowitz added.
Horowitz framed the shift as a wholesale reinvention — from a teenage denim-and-T-shirt label to a broader lifestyle brand designed to grow up with its customer. The company now targets shoppers closer to 20 and aims to keep them well into their 40s. For Abercrombie, the NFL partnership is less about moving sweatshirts this weekend than signalling how far the brand has travelled.
Only time will tell if this latest move solidifies the partnership’s worth on both sides — but insiders say it’s a credible step, even if it’s unlikely to deliver significant revenues in the short term.
“I don’t think this is really a volume play, per se, but more of a consumer acquisition play,” said Matt Powell, an advisor for BCE Consulting.
Powell said the bigger opportunity will be in how brands and leagues continue to evolve their execution around fashion partnerships, particularly by leaning into more off-field moments.
“The walk from the bus to the locker room has become the new runway,” he said. “I think it’s really interesting that [more] brands have not figured out how to leverage that for themselves.”
As Goodell sees it, the league’s strategy is already proving itself close to home.
“My daughter left here this morning to go off to work with her Abercrombie Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt,” he said, referring to his 20-something year old. “I can see it through my twin daughters, the connection to the product, and they feel a coolness to it, and it just makes better fans. It makes more passionate fans.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on Feb. 6, 2026 to clarify that the Abercrombie x NFL fashion event is a presentation rather than a runway show.
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