The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Courtside Kingwear
If you know me or read me or have been around me IRL you know that basically three topics likely to come up in conversation with me are the movie Goodfellas, bootleg merch or basketball. And last night, none other than the King himself, LeBron James, put all three of those things together, showing up to a summer league game wearing a Goodfellas shirt. And not just any old shirt connected to the 1990 Marty Scorsese classic, but a bootleg one made by one of my favorite shirt people, James Khubiar, also known as Justified Arrogance.
The NBA “league fits” culture has become one of the great platform for players to show off their sense of style, but also a way for brands to break out. There are the big-name brands like Givenchy or Gucci, great patterns, kilts, big cat prints and lots and lots of sneakers, but there’s also plenty of stuff that sends fans scrambling. People that make fun of somebody like Kyle Kuzma on the court will endless search to find out what it was Kuz wore to the locker room before the game. A lot of it looks great, some of it is very who let you out of the mansion like that, but I’d wager most of the things you see NBA stars showing up these days is picked out by somebody other than them. That’s not saying that NBA stars don’t know how to dress themselves, but there has to be some degree of help or somebody saying, “No, James Harden, you can’t wear tartan pants and that Seinfeld pirate shirt and a bowler hat. Why? Because it looks crazy!”
I could be wrong, and I’m not saying there aren’t at least a few players that definitely pick out everything they’re showing up to the game in, but I do find LeBron James, the former standard bearer for the game (sorry, Giannis took the crown after the Bucks won a championship. The game lines up behind him now. I don’t make the rules. Also, the new Space Jam was such an abomination I am considering knocking James down a notch from my personal “best ever” list of players. ) is sitting around looking at Instagram accounts of guys who reprint mostly old hardcore and metal shirts to a cult-sized audience.
But, again, I could be wrong. I’m always willing to admit that. Maybe LeBron is a secret bootleg head (a boothead? Is that a thing?). Who knows but LeBron and probably the small army of people he’s got working for him? Either way, Justified Arrogance has been one of my favorite accounts to follow over the last few years. I’ve somehow never copped any of his shirts (though I have been seriously considering the Jesus Lizard one he just put out), but seeing somebody world famous like LeBron in a bootleg shirt, one of the first times I can recall seeing something like that happen, is pretty surprising. The shirt is great, but LeBron James wearing it and having it show up all over the Instagram probably sent countless marks scrambling to find “vintage Goodfellas shirt” thinking they’d be willing to drop a hundred or more to buy a shirt just like LeBron had on, all the while maybe not knowing LeBron or whoever helps buy clothes for LeBron paid a guy thirty bucks off a site called Das Bootleg.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter why LeBron showed up with new teammate Russell Westbrook — who was clad in a Pearl Jam t-shirt that, judging by the design, looks like it’s probably a bootleg based off something the band sold in their early days — in the Goodfellas shirt. What is interesting to me is how deep famous people are willing to go to wear things that likely nobody else has. Forget money, because while not everybody can have LeBron cash, some rich guy scrolling Instagram could see a pair of Nikes or something and be like “five thousand bucks? I can pay that for a pair of shoes I’ll maybe wear once.” But if that rich guy wants a Goodfellas shirt just like LeBron’s, they’re going to probably have to do a little work. It’s not as easy as typing the name of a pair of sneakers into StockX and seeing if there is a pair in your size. That’s what ultimately fascinates me with the rise of bootleg culture. It’s something that had been deep among Grateful Dead and also hardcore punk fans for along time and, somewhat surprisingly, ended up joining those two seemingly disparate cultures together over the last decade, but something that is now popping up in the mainstream. A sneaky way for people to say “I’ve got something you don’t,” because most people don’t know where to look.
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