Last Tuesday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola lost to Real Madrid in a £270 shirt.

The grungy flannel number from the cult Swedish menswear brand Our Legacy was so noteworthy it consumed more post-match oxygen than the news that Manchester City had been dumped out of the Champions League before the quarter-finals. Never mind that Guardiola is beginning to look bereft of ideas for the first time in his career. All anyone cared about was whether he’d hired a stylist.

It’s hard to imagine a footballer’s outfit generating this much attention, but where male managers are concerned, certain rules are still very much in force. This week’s Carabao Cup final against Arsenal at Wembley saw Guardiola wearing a navy turtleneck and brown wool herringbone trousers, an outfit that waged a deliberate campaign of gen X reinvention. Having revolutionised basically every aspect of the English game in his decade at City, it seems his final revolution is changing what it’s possible for a manager to wear on the touchline.

But was Pep’s shirt a sign of a genuine shift? Rather than quiet quit with months of the season still ahead, and speculation growing that it would be his last, was he opting to embrace the din with a knowing smile and air of self-expression? Or had he simply given control of his wardrobe to his gen Z influencer daughter.

Traditionally, aspiring managers have two wardrobe options: the tracksuit and baseball cap of a training-ground drill sergeant, or the dark suit and tie of a man who sees himself at a remove from his players.

This binary began to crumble in the mid-90s with the arrival of Arsène Wenger. The debonair Frenchman married an air of sophistication with a bookish, bespectacled look that quickly earned him the nickname Le Professeur, only to be replaced by an insistence on wearing extremely long sports coats. The Wenger coat became a streetwear staple and, before Pep’s recent intervention, was undoubtedly the most iconic piece of managerial clobber in British sporting history.

Where Wenger’s look said cerebral, José Mourinho’s said something altogether more dangerous. The handsome Portuguese manager arrived at Chelsea in 2004 radiating a kind of louche authority that said: beneath the Armani suits and perfectly tied scarves, I am hard as nails. No wonder women loved him. His teams were ruthless, pragmatic and, in those early years at least, victorious. The sartorial peacocking was an alibi of sorts – a cover for the grim efficiency that characterised the way Chelsea played.

Guardiola has always been fashion aware. He briefly modelled for Catalan designer Antonio Miró, while starring in Barcelona’s midfield. As Barcelona manager, from 2008 to 2012, he wore dark, knife-sharp suits and a shaved head, lending him the look of a sort of footballing monk. At Bayern from 2013 to 2016, he largely disappeared into club kit, his personality subsumed to an extent by one of Germany’s most enduring cultural institutions. His arrival at Manchester City in 2016 brought fashion from Rick Owens, Stone Island and CP company – younger, more culturally fluent, but still utilitarian.

Daniel-Yaw Miller, fashion and sports journalist and founder of the SportsVerse newsletter, agrees the shift in Pep’s wardrobe this season is emblematic of a new phase in the legendary manager’s career. “He’s reached that point when people start thinking about the years beyond management and style is often a tool to communicate that – to signal that they’re ready to have a bit more fun,” he says. “With Pep specifically, it feels like the handbrake has come off. You see it in how he is with his players, in his press conferences, and now in what he’s wearing,” says Miller.

His changing looks are also in stark contrast to the younger managers in the premier league. Mikel Arteta, a former assistant of Guardiola’s at City, has spent his Arsenal tenure aggressively seeking gravitas through quarter-zips and cashmere sweaters. Liam Rosenior has been roundly mocked for his failure to bring coherence to a talented Chelsea side while wearing hoodies under his suit jacket and designer glasses. Brighton’s Fabian Hürzeler’s look is even more extreme. Just 31 and younger than several of his own players, he dresses less like a manager and more like a student swinging by the gym after lectures.

So, the question of whether any of this actually matters remains. “Football managers are the most neurotic, detail-obsessed people – they don’t leave a single thing in their preparation to chance. It would be naive to think what they wear doesn’t fall into that,” says Miller. He draws a parallel with Lewis Hamilton, a man who had a terrible season in Formula One last year but who remained central to the cultural conversation around his sport through savvy dressing at race weekends.

What a manager wears is ultimately a statement about how he sees the game, and his place within it. Wenger saw himself as an intellectual. Mourinho saw himself as a star. The tracksuit managers of yesteryear saw themselves as sergeants. Pep, it turns out, is something else entirely now – a man who has won everything there is to win, and knows that the conversation about what he’s wearing is probably more interesting than whether he’s any good at his job.

The Guardian

From British royalty to Hollywood stars, Jimmy Choo’s luxury shoes have been worn by countless celebrities on red carpets around the world.

Now Choo is helping the next generation of fashion designers to follow in his footsteps, with the opening of an online store selling clothes and accessories made by students and graduates of his design program the JCA London Fashion Academy.

“My father always said to me, if you have the knowledge and the skills, if you pass on your legacy, then the younger generation [can have] all the skills and knowledge as well,” he told CNBC. Choo was born in Malaysia, where his father taught him how to make shoes by hand.

Choo opened the academy in 2021, offering students a bachelor’s or master’s degree in entrepreneurship in design and brand innovation — with business a key part of the program.

“It’s very important … to [help] them start a business, to see how to sell,” Choo told CNBC.

Students learn about marketing and PR and write business plans with the aim of starting their own “micro” fashion enterprise after graduation, according to a description on the academy’s website.

“Even the most talented of fashion designers will fail if they have no business acumen,” Choo said in a press release.

The academy also opened a temporary physical location — the JCA Retail Gallery — on the ground floor of the upscale White City Living development in west London, where the students’ collections were exhibited and on sale last week.

“The idea of launching this was to give [students] a platform to sell their work without having to pay the fees of what you would usually pay to [rent a] retail [store] and give them that opportunity to speak to the general public,” said Olivia Black, one of the academy’s graduates and co-curator of the JCA Retail Gallery. The retail space was gifted to the academy by real estate firm Berkeley Group.

Black said Choo gave feedback on her eponymous fashion label during its creation, advising her to develop the idea of her brand’s motif — an eagle. “He always says, like, focus on something that makes the garment really special,” Black said.

Sustainability is a focus for the students. Many of the clothes were produced from deadstock or second-hand fabrics, while some were made to be modular with zips or bows allowing sleeves or trouser legs to be added or removed for different occasions. Choo suggested designers could use the offcuts from the production of luxury garments to make more affordable pieces.

Last year, McKinsey predicted that generative artificial intelligence could add between $150 billion and $275 billion to the fashion and luxury sectors’ operating profits as soon as 2026. What does Choo make of AI and its effect on the fashion industry? He said AI is useful for students’ exercises, or for translating letters from Chinese, but he warned that it shouldn’t be used for everything.

“Because people can see — if you use AI, everything will come out the same,” he said. “You can use [it] as a guideline, but not 100% to take it and do everything. Otherwise, you’ve lost your skill,” Choo said.

Choo studied at London footwear college Cordwainers in the early 1980s, and made shoes for a show at London Fashion Week later that decade. Vogue magazine journalist Kate Phelan saw his designs and called him, saying “Jimmy … we want those shoes,” Choo told CNBC. The magazine ran a feature on his shoes over several pages, and Choo found a customer in Diana, Princess of Wales in the 1990s.

Choo sold his 50% stake in the eponymous shoe business when the company was valued at £21 million in 2001 and the brand is now owned by Capri Holdings, which bought it in a $1.35 billion deal in 2017.

CNBC

When U.S. figure skaters Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito take to the ice to compete at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, they all wear dresses designed by the same woman.

The designer’s name is Lisa McKinnon, and she’s outfitted all three women competing for Team USA in singles figure skating events, plus two American ice dancers and two South Korean skaters at these Olympics. Collectively, the seven athletes are set to compete in at least 13 costumes from Lisa McKinnon Designs, a Los Angeles-based studio that McKinnon launched in 2014.

McKinnon works between 40 and 60 hours per week, regardless of the season, she tells CNBC Make It. She and her five employees handmade nearly 700 costumes, for skaters across every discipline and level, in 2025, she estimates. The business charges $90 per hour, and its custom costumes for high-level skaters typically cost between $4,000 and $8,000 apiece, she says. (McKinnon declined to share the business’s total annual revenue.)

Most clients, regardless of their desired final product, have to request costumes at least six months in advance, and McKinnon’s team often works on a costume up until the deadline, she says. The timeline is largely due to demand, and to budget time for costume emergencies or special requests.

One such special request: In December, Liu — the reigning world champion — asked McKinnon to design her a new dress for her Lady Gaga-themed program at the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in early January. McKinnon finished the dress in a hotel room in St. Louis on the day Liu competed in the costume, the designer says.

“I really care so much about every single project that I do. A little blood, sweat and tears are a totally common thing for me, [though] I don’t cry as much [these days]” says McKinnon, 47.

Skating is ‘in my blood’

McKinnon, born and raised in Sweden, grew up a figure skater and made her first competition costume for herself at age 15. She didn’t have any crystals, which are commonly glued onto skating dresses, so she hand-sewed paillettes — sequins secured onto the fabric with tiny beads, she says.

She began making costumes for other skaters later that year, after a request from a member of the Swedish national team, she says. But mostly, she pursued her own skating career — eventually performing in professional shows like Disney On Ice for eight years, then workingon them as a performance director for another eight years, she says.

McKinnon started spending her summers between shows in the U.S. starting in 2006, and after leaving the skating world, pursued jobs supervising costume departments in Las Vegas and then Los Angeles. In 2013, she was the costume supervisor at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California, when an old friend — who was a skating coach at a local rink — asked if she’d design a costume for a student, she says.

The dress was eye-catching enough for other local parents and athletes to start coming to McKinnon, she says. She quit her job in late 2014 to launch her business, she says, and has since built a reputation for making costumes that add storytelling to each individual skating routine’s theme.

Within a year, some of the country’s top stars living in or near Los Angeles, home to multiple high-level skating coaches, were competing in her costumes. One early Los Angeles-based client, Ashley Wagner, was already a multi-time U.S. national champion when she started working with McKinnon. Another, Karen Chen, later competed in multiple Olympic Games, winning a gold medal in the team event at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

McKinnon vividly remembers the first time she saw her designs on national television, she says: Wagner and Chen wore them on the podium after winning silver and gold at the 2017 U.S. National Figure Skating Championships.

“I drank a lot of champagne and I definitely shed some tears,” says McKinnon.

Her business is small, relative to its demand. To keep up, McKinnon arrives early in the morning to do paperwork and often stays late to tidy up, tossing scraps of fabric and reorganizing crystals, she says. Competitive skating and costume designing both require determination, resilience and ambition, she adds.

“I’m really competitive. I want to do the things I’m good at, and I want to be the best,” says McKinnon, adding: “Once you’ve skated, it’s always going to be a part of your life somehow. It sticks with you. It’s always been part of my life and I feel like it’s in my blood.”

CNBC