On Opening Ceremony Looks & Olympic Gear Hauls
The Fashion Olympics begin.
Winners & Losers at the Opening Ceremony
I am a boat girl. So when Paris 2024 announced that the parade of nations would happen via boat on the Seine, I was all in. Sadly the concept was better than the execution. It’s ironic, given all the emphasis on French fashion, that the boats made it difficult to appreciate the outfits. The pouring rain did them no favors either. Thank goodness for athlete social media (more on that below), which offered a glimpse at what the outfits looked like underneath the ponchos. I spent the ceremonies with one eye on the Seine and one eye on my For You Page. Here’s what I thought.
Best Dressed
Haiti: I’ve complained in previous newsletters that Opening Ceremony looks generally do women few favors. So I loved that Haiti’s outfits included distinct, impeccably tailored designs for women. Their spin on a blazer, with its cap sleeves and belt was particularly chic, especially paired with the graphic skirt by Haitian artist Philippe Dodard. Designer Stella Jean said looks, which pulled from traditional Haitian and Caribbean designs, were “a tool of counter colonization.”
Philippines: The countries that stood out were those, like the Philippines, that forwent the “traditional” blazer to celebrate their cultural dress. The Filipino delegation looked incredibly cool in their reimagined barongs. The richly embroidered shirts designed by Francis Libiran featured a detachable red and blue sling embroidered with colors and graphics from the flag. More from Vogue Philippines, here.1
Mongolia: Michel and Amazonka Choigaalaa designed the Mongolian deels, which generated major pre-Ceremony buzz on social media. I can’t remember another Olympics where so many outfits were released online ahead of the Games and Mongolia’s PR strategy paid off big time. If we’d only seen these from the boats, it would have been hard to appreciate all elements of these looks – which took an average of 20 hours to craft – including embroidered mountains, clouds, birds, and the Olympic torch.
Chinese Taipei & South Sudan: I just said that the best looks scrapped the blazer, but credit to the Taiwanese and the Sudanese for making the double-breasted suit all their own.
Brazil: The Brazilians earned their slot thanks to their surfers, who showed off their looks at a separate (better?) opening ceremony in Tahiti. Is it any surprise that surfers can make almost anything look good? Brazil’s jean jackets and striped green tees looked effortlessly cool when paired with white flip-flops and tans. Peru’s uniforms similarly benefited from the surfers’s styling. It made their red patterned blazers feel beachy and bold.
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Most Practical
The Scandinavians: I don’t know if they adapted their looks for the weather, but Sweden’s and Norway’s teams both donned rain jackets, which, while not groundbreaking fashion like Mongolia’s, was better than pretty much any look covered in a plastic poncho.
Worst Dressed
USA: This Ralph Lauren look was both uninspired and unflattering. It was telling that many athletes tried to style the outfit differently – whether it was A’Ja Wilson tying her shirt into a crop top or Sha’Carri Richardson swapping the white hush puppies for Nikes. I saw on various athletes’ social media that the jeans did not fit, which is a particularly galling faux pas given that jeans are the closest thing America has to national dress. The women’s featured a terrible, cropped barrel cut and I saw many athletes opting for the men’s fit instead. Not what you want to see.
Italy: If any nation could challenge France on the fashion front, it’s Italy. So why did their Armani looks resemble sweatsuits?
Estonia: My husband called their long jorts “rather Eastern European of them.”
Great Britain: Those flag tees were tacky.
Ireland: I have a theory that the Irish (and their diaspora) have terrible fashion because of a combination of Catholic school uniforms, bad weather, and Tall Poppy syndrome. This look adds fuel to my theory’s fire.
Best Accessories
Many of the Australian women tied their scarves into their ponytails, which made for a jaunty look.
The Lesotho delegation wore traditional straw hats, a design inspired by the conical shape of their Mount Qiloane.
Best Boats
Some of the smallest nations – Bhutan, Cayman Islands, Suriname, and Cambodia in particular – lucked out, parading in small, vintage water crafts that added more glamour to their procession. As a boat girly, I appreciated that The Athletic chose to cover this important topic in depth.
The TikTok Games
My TikTok For You Page is a digital parade of Olympians having the time of their life in the Village. Gear hauls (as covered by the New York Times) make up the bulk of the content, along with reviews of the cardboard beds (bad!)) and inside looks at the ship in Tahiti on which the surfers live (good!). NYMag compared the content coming out of Paris to Alabama RushTok, complete with a cohort of emerging stars. While I was originally drawn to the content for a closer look at each federation’s outfits, I have become fascinated by the psychology of it all. Isn’t content creation a potential distraction or stressor? Are the athletes hedging their bets in terms of growing their platforms? These questions have been nagging me as I scroll, so I emailed a former Olympian for her POV. Here’s what 2012 rowing gold medalist Taylor Ritzel had to say (more from her below):
LG: What do you think of all the social media from the Village? Can athletes balance creating content and competing at a high level?
TR: Ooh that’s so such a good question and something I've been thinking a lot about. When I was on the team, we weren't even allowed to take our laundry to the machines across campus, we had our coxswain do it. I think it's a distraction if I'm being honest, but I'm also very aware that this offers an incredible opportunity for people to build their brand and create real opportunities for monetization. I'd be curious if some of the more followed athletes have teams or people helping make it for them... I'll also be curious to see how the big social media stars perform.
LG: Maybe it’s because we are millennials that we think it could be a distraction? We “grew up” in college alongside social media in the mid-2000s. Remember we had all sorts of rules about posting? And we were so limited before smartphones, so we couldn’t document everything at every minute of the day. We had to go back to our dorms and post cringy Facebook albums after the fact. These athletes have basically never competed without social media and probably don’t think of it with trepidation the way we do. They document their day because it’s natural for them to do so. I think the clever ones are trying to market themselves and are aware that the growth of their social media and fame(!) could come as much from their out-of-competition actions as from their results. Especially if they are in a niche sport. They are so much savvier than we were!
TR: Yeah that's a great point. It's so engrained in their day-to-day already. Man, we're old. I do wonder what the team dynamic is like given that some individuals pop, while others might not, and it's not dependent on performance.
LG: There’s a heptathlete named Chari Hawkins who has thousands of followers and just made her first Olympics in her thirties. I heard her tell Citius Mag that she knows other athletes have snarked on her social presence because she “wasn’t good enough” to have earned so many more followers. Maybe on teams people have more context? I could see jealousy being an issue in individual sports…
TR: Oh interesting! Yeah, I can see that. I could also see that being on a team with standout stars could create more resentment? But, regardless, I think it's good for the sport!
It’s too early to say what the impact of rampant TikToking will be on athletes’ or their teams’ performances. For now, it seems they’re having fun with it and “having fun” is often a prelude to success. If the original TikTok Olympian Ilona Maher’s impact is any indication, the social buzz is, as Taylor said, incredibly “good for the sport.” Women’s rugby broke an attendance record in Paris on Sunday. The announcer’s comments on Maher, who dominated in her performance against the Japanese, summed things up perfectly: “Ilona Maher is a social media star but with the substance on the field to back it up.”
The River is my Runway
Taylor Ritzel won the gold medal in the women’s eight at the 2012 Olympics in London. She is also a two-time World Champion and three-time NCAA Champion. When she’s not leading teams in the office as a Chief People Officer she can be found running on the trails and roads in Denver. I wanted to speak to Taylor about her gear haul experiences in London and explore how she dresses for performance on the water and off.
What was your introduction to sports? Do you remember what you wore?
I started doing gymnastics and swimming at around the same time at age 5. Unfortunately, I was not long for gymnastics given my height and lack of skills, but I loved swimming. Once I got over the initial hurdle of feeling comfortable in the water, you couldn't keep me out of the pool. While I don't exactly remember what I wore, I do know each summer we'd get special team-issued swimsuits to race in, sporting bright green hues and some unflattering cuts. I can tell you training and racing suits have gotten so much cuter since the 2000s!
As a rower, did you dress differently for practice vs competition? Was there gear that made you feel more confident?
Definitely! I started rowing right before I got to college, so the entire wardrobe was new to me. Even though I'd been parading around in swimsuits for 12 years up to that point, I did not immediately love the traditional unisuits that rowers wear. They felt too exposing and unflattering. The cut seemed to highlight some of my least favorite areas. For training, I'd typically wear a cotton t-shirt and unisuit rolled down, which not only made it easier to run to the bathroom between erg sets, but also served as a pouch to hold my iPod as I sat on the rowing machine (how did we survive without airpods?).
For racing, I'd only pull the unisuit all the way up as I got ready to go to the start line. To me, wearing the unisuit as intended meant one thing: it was time to race. In terms of feeling most confident, I'd say I had favorite unis that I'd wear depending on the workout. I liked doing erg tests in a very comfortable and thin Superman uni a teammate gave me. While the Yale uni was very traditional looking and so thickly lined it could sometimes feel like you were wearing a diaper, I loved racing in that thing.
What was the gear experience like for you as an Olympian? What did you like or dislike?
As a serial over-packer, I remember arriving in London with two very full and very large duffel bags, one full of training and racing gear and one full of going-out clothes, most of which I hadn't really worn since college because it turns out you don't go out much when you're training full time. That was a mistake. They gave us SO MUCH STUFF. We got a huge duffel bag full of Nike gear and another full of Ralph Lauren gear. Trying it all on there was a special experience, especially having people help find you different sizes or take your measurements for the Opening and Closing Ceremony outfits. While not all the gear was what I would choose for myself, it still felt very special. In addition to receiving all that gear at Processing (what they call it when you arrive, get your gear, and get settled in), we received sport-specific gear. To be honest, I was a little bummed about our gear as rowers because we weren't sponsored by Nike or even JL (a traditional rowing brand that many rowers continue to wear). Instead, we were sponsored by Boathouse, a rowing and lacrosse apparel company that was mostly known for producing rain jackets. They did give us a lot of cool gear, and beggars certainly can't be choosers, but let's just say I didn't love the fact that we raced in white spandex and then had to wear that on the podium.
I watched some videos and noticed how the outfits don't fit the gymnasts well because they are so short. You on the other hand are quite tall, did you have any challenges with the gear you got?
Thankfully, fit wasn't really an issue for me. That could be because Boathouse had been tailoring gear towards tall rowers from the beginning. I have certainly struggled with fit over the years though with all sorts of gear. For me, I like to wear Men's Large for both pants and shirts because they're typically longer and they don't have the typical hip flare-out look that most large women's sizes have.
You were gold medal favorites going into the final, did that change how you dressed for the competition? Did you think about all the photos etc at all? Wear makeup?
Well, first of all, all athletes are given a podium outfit, a stylish look that you are meant to wear during the medal ceremony. Unfortunately for rowers, we didn't get the opportunity to shower, do our hair, put on that awesome outfit and get ready to receive our medals. We had to go straight from the finish line to the medals dock in our sweaty, see-through white spandex. So, that was unfortunate, to say the least. To make matters worse, they wanted us to take our hats off, so my hair left a lot to be desired. I remember seeing my teammates put makeup on ahead of the race and I didn't like it. I thought it meant that they were expecting to be on that podium and overly focused on the end result instead of what we were there to do: execute a great race. Whelp, I was wrong. I wish I would've put on makeup, that's for sure!
What was the Olympic Village like? How did you dress while you were there?
There was a separate rowing Olympic Village where we ate and slept during our competition, which was the first week. Only rowers stayed there, so it felt very similar to a typical World Championship. We all pretty much just wore Team USA gear, anything that was comfortable and easy in between practices and racing. Once we finished we all moved to the main Olympic Village, which was an entirely new experience. Having brought all that going-out attire, I thought I was ready to go, however, most everyone continued to wear athletic gear. Even when going out we'd wear the gear we were given during Processing. My poor Dad ended up taking my two huge bags back home... oops!
You remain an endurance athlete and have been doing a lot of running recently. What gear do you wear to go far?
Yes! I love to run. Given my penchant for cotton t-shirts (I think I may be the only athlete that still likes wearing them especially given how much I sweat), I typically wear old race shirts and leggings. I've found that Peloton has great leggings that fit me well and last longer than most other brands. Their Cadent Tights are my favorite. Fortunately, I no longer wear unisuits.
What's missing from the market for an athlete like you? Are there good options for someone who is 6'2"? Has that changed at all since you were competing?
Great question! I'm definitely a creature of habit, so when I find something I like, I tend to buy multiples. I haven't ventured too far outside of my typical workout gear because I find that most brands either aren't meant for taller women or they are tight in weird places. I'd love to see brands expand their tall offerings, especially for endurance sports. I haven't tried the new gear that the national team is wearing nowadays (they're sponsored by 776BC, an international rowing brand), but they look cool!
Quick Thoughts
Things that drew my eye or ire…
A few final, super quick thoughts for you all.
Bandit for St. Vincent & the Grenadines looks sharp.
For more context on the LVMH of it all in Paris and how Olympic fashion sponsorships work, listen to the always excellent Fashion People podcast from Lauren Sherman.
It’s interesting that, as far as I can tell, tennis players are some of the only athletes who get to wear their sponsors kit during the games vs a standard team uniform. I liked Coco’s New Balance look and her big white bow (I am usually anti-bow, I make exceptions for people in the top 10 of their sport). I’d also like to know more about Coco’s makeup for the Opening Ceremony, as she looked flawless despite being drenched in rain.
Related to Taylor’s comments above about her podium appearance, I want hear from swimmers about their feelings on receiving their medals with still-wet hair. I would be incredibly annoyed if I got my gold medal with bad hair, but my swimmer friend said it’s just how it always goes. But those pictures will haunt you forever! It seems like they could be granted 10 minutes to blow it dry.
Loved this round-up of vintage Olympic gear
The Philippine leos for the Qualification round of gymnastics were also excellent. More on gymnastics soon!
Also a boat girl! Thanks for the mention, and this excellent overview!