NBA icon Allen Iverson is known for his moves on and off the court. Making the NBA court his own personal runway with his unique fashion sense and infamously getting his hair braided on the sidelines made him the cultural figure that he is today. While fans have immortalized the basketball legend for how he chose to express himself, Iverson revealed that it was actually an act of rebellion against the NBA's strict dress code.
“I took the a** whooping for it, but the dress code thing… I was 21. Where am I going after the game? I'm going to the club. Before that, they were used to dudes wearing suits, and I was like, d***. I'd never worn a suit growing up, except to church, funerals… in the courtroom,” Iverson said on his recent appearance on The Breakfast Club.
David Stern, who was the NBA commissioner at the time, required players to wear suits when arriving at games. Iverson pioneered streetwear being worn instead, something that other players followed suit with, such as the late Kobe Bryant.
“David Stern and the rest of the NBA was like, ‘No,' because it was all right when I was doing it,” Iverson said of the late NBA commissioner. “But then everybody else said, ‘Okay, like he can do that, we can do this.' You see Kobe coming in with diamond chains and baggy clothes, and everyone started doing it. Then the league was like, ‘Hold on, we got to do something about that.'”
Iverson rejected that ideology with the baggy clothes he wore to games even though he was labeled a “thug” for doing so and called out the double standard.
“It proved a lot to me at a young age about stereotyping people […] John Gotti kept on a $2,000 suit, but what was he? He get busy. So it ain't about what you got on the outside. It's who you are,” he said.
Iverson reminisces about his time in the NBA via his new book Misunderstood out now.
