NEW YORK. Fanwear has spent years trying to look less like merchandise and more like fashion. Terez just took that argument straight to a runway.
On the eve of New York Fashion Week, founder Zara Terez Tisch staged the brand’s first runway show in Manhattan with New York sports at the center of the visual language. The collection moved through the Giants, Jets, Knicks, Yankees, Mets, Rangers, Nets, Gotham FC and New York Liberty, treating team identity as something that belongs in a wardrobe, not just in a stadium seat.
The casting made the point even sharper. Ali Brunson, Marissa Ayers and Katia Lindor were among the women on the runway, bringing a direct connection to the teams and fan cultures the clothes were built around. The show was styled by Erin Walsh and also previewed an Anne Hathaway collaboration tied to the emotional pull of Madison Square Garden.
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The jersey is no longer the whole story
For decades, licensed sportswear followed a predictable formula: logo, team colors, familiar silhouette. That formula still works. What is changing is the expectation around it. Fans increasingly want pieces that can move from the arena to dinner, work, travel, nightlife and everyday streetwear without feeling like a costume change.
Terez has been building directly into that gap. The New York-based brand has expanded its licensed work across the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA and NWSL, with a specific focus on women and girls. That matters because women’s sports merchandise has too often been treated as a smaller version of the men’s assortment rather than its own fashion category.
New York teams are becoming fashion properties
The runway also shows how valuable New York team marks have become outside traditional sports retail. A Giants jacket or Knicks sweater is not only a signal of fandom. In the right silhouette, it can function as a piece of New York identity.
That is where the opportunity gets bigger. Sports properties are competing not only for ticket sales and television attention, but for wardrobe space. Fashion brands are competing for cultural relevance. When the collaboration works, both sides get something they could not create alone.
The women around sports are part of the style economy
Putting women with real proximity to New York sports culture on the runway was more than celebrity casting. It acknowledged something teams and brands have been slower to formalize: women around sports have become visible tastemakers in their own right. Their game-day looks, social posts and fashion choices can move product and shape how fandom is presented.
The strongest part of the Terez show was that it did not ask sports fashion to become less recognizable. The team marks stayed visible. The point was to change the styling, fabrication and context around them.
Why fanwear belongs in the fashion conversation
The next phase of fanwear is not about hiding the logo. It is about making the logo worth styling.
Terez putting New York sports on a Fashion Week runway is another sign that the wall between fashion and sports is getting thinner. Tunnel fits already trained fans to watch athletes as style figures. Now brands are building the retail system around that behavior.
For New York, the fit is especially natural. The city has always let basketball, football, baseball, music and fashion borrow from one another. Terez is simply making the crossover explicit and putting it under runway lights.
Sources: The Knockturnal, Fashionista, New York Post and Terez. Event photography credited to Terez where noted.
