The black T-shirt spells it out in capital letters: “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports.”
In the previous few months, the message has been arduous to overlook. Dawn Staley, the coach of the University of South Carolina’s girls’s basketball workforce, kicked off a social media frenzy when she wore the shirt for a pregame interview in January. The comic and actor Jason Sudeikis wore a model with yellow lettering to the ladies’s N.C.A.A. match finals in April. Jimmy Fallon received one on “The Tonight Show” as a present from the just lately retired W.N.B.A. star Sue Bird.
The shirt, which was created by an organization co-founded by Ms. Bird, has develop into an unofficial uniform as viewership of ladies’s basketball has soared, and girls’s sports activities usually have seen larger momentum.
Megan Ramos, 25, noticed greater than a dozen of the shirts at a W.N.B.A. sport final month. “Shipping is slightly behind,” stated Ms. Ramos, who ordered hers in April, “as a result of everybody desires them.”
The short-sleeved shirt, which sells for $45, was launched final December by Togethxr, the media and attire firm created in 2021 by Ms. Bird, the soccer participant Alex Morgan, the swimmer Simone Manuel and the snowboarder Chloe Kim. (A hoodie can also be out there for $85.)
The slogan goals to show a typical jab in opposition to girls’s sports activities on its head. “It’s a play on individuals saying, ‘Nobody watches girls’s sports activities’ — like, John590 from Twitter with no profile pic,” Ms. Bird told Mr. Fallon. “Now the numbers present it, which is wonderful, so now we even have knowledge to it. Actually, everybody watches girls’s sports activities.”
More than 18 million individuals watched the 2024 N.C.A.A. girls’s basketball championship sport, which outperformed the lads’s remaining. A rookie class that features Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese led the W.N.B.A. draft to document viewership, and established stars like A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart are contributing to swelling ticket gross sales for W.N.B.A. video games.
The workforce at Togethxr hopes that the black-and-white shirt can attraction to followers of all of the gamers, irrespective of the workforce. “Not placing it in sure colorways, or not making them athlete-specific or team-specific was intentional as a result of we wished it to really feel common,” stated Jessica Robertson, the corporate’s chief content material officer and a co-founder.
The firm stated it bought $3 million value of shirts, hoodies and tote luggage with the slogan to date this 12 months, together with 20,000 of the merchandise throughout a three-day stretch on the finish of this 12 months’s N.C.A.A. match.
The same scenario performed out in 2020, when a bright orange W.N.B.A. hoodie became a fixture amongst N.B.A. gamers (and Mr. Sudeikis). But Ms. Robertson stated that firms typically nonetheless assume that the return on funding for ladies’s sports activities merchandise will probably be low.
“The reality is, girls’s sports activities followers have been right here,” she stated. “You simply must make it out there.”
Jackie Johnston, who makes movies about girls’s sports activities on TikTok beneath the title Coach Jackie, stated she had seen the shirts at girls’s soccer video games, homosexual bars and a current live performance for the drummer G Flip.
Ms. Johnston, 22, stated a part of the shirt’s reputation might be attributed to a built-in camaraderie inside a neighborhood that has lengthy fought to be acknowledged. “When a feminine athlete that I like is sporting one thing, I’m like, Yes, I wish to put on that,” she stated. “You wish to be like Dawn. You wish to be like Caitlin. You wish to be like Alex Morgan.”
The shirt appears designed to bridge the hole between longtime girls’s basketball followers and newer ones who’ve been hopping on the Caitlin Clark bandwagon. Other merchandise is a bit more pointed.
“If you might be simply now tuning in to girls’s basketball, we instructed you so,” reads an orange-and-white hoodie by Playa Society, a streetwear model that makes girls’s sports activities attire. Playa Society’s web site describes the piece as “a press release for individuals who knew that girls’s basketball was dope, earlier than 2024.”
Ms. Ramos, who counts herself among the many newer group of followers, stated she is glad to change a understanding smile with different individuals sporting the shirt when she sees them within the wild. She is already serious about ordering one of many Togethxr hoodies.
And the corporate has new objects on the way in which, together with a shirt to be launched earlier than the Paris Olympics with a phrase in French: “Tout le monde regarde le sport féminin.” You can in all probability guess what it means.
