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“It started with us finding jackets from Zara,” says Lauren Kyle McDavid. “I would go on my Adobe InDesign and design something on the mock-up of the jacket and send it to the local embroiderer here.”
Kyle McDavid, wife of Oilers captain and NHL star Connor McDavid, runs the design and fabrication process of Edmonton’s WAGs jackets, worn by players’ wives and girlfriends. The tradition, Kyle McDavid tells Front Office Sports, has come a long way. This year, she created custom blue-suede barn jackets with a woven leather intrecciato collar, similar to the hallmark of Italian luxury fashion house Bottega Veneta.
WAGs jackets are a tradition for the Stanley Cup playoffs and other special events like the NHL’s Winter Classic and Stadium Series. Each garment often showcases the team’s logo and, crucially, the last name and number of the WAG’s significant other. (Kids sometimes get their own looks, too.) And although these garments aren’t exclusive to hockey, during the postseason, the designs are a big fan draw across social media for adulation—and runway-esque analysis.
“I think culture outside of sports is in general becoming more popular in every sport. I would say we’re starting to see a shift of not just the players, but also their lifestyle, their family, and what their social life looks like,” says Kyle McDavid. This year was the first she made the Oilers WAGs jackets under her unisex sportswear apparel brand label, Sports Club Atelier, which she started in December 2024. The brand is a line of limited-edition Oilers gear—jackets, sweaters, and other accessories such as baseball caps and hair clips. The WAGs jackets, however, are fully custom.
This year, Kyle McDavid also created the jackets for the Jets, Stars, and Golden Knights—all of which, alongside the Oilers, made it through the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. She had to decline other teams’ requests because she was at capacity with the designs, which she says take about two weeks from conception to final product.
She says pricing can shoot up from express shipping to hit the short timeline. “We make up our costs and then add a little margin for that. But I feel that we’re charging a very reasonable cost for them; it’s not a premium right now.” (Kyle McDavid declined to provide specific pricing information.) She works with manufacturers in China, Pakistan, and Portugal and says she’s already looking to expand her sourcing next season for quality and customization.
Hillary Trocheck thinks the fan interest around the outfits was driven in part by Kristin Juszczyk, who designed a custom Kansas City Chiefs jacket for Taylor Swift last year (Swift’s boyfriend is Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce). Trocheck, whose husband, Vincent, plays for the Rangers, launched her own clothing brand, Statement Threads Shop, in April 2024. She carries a few items ready-made, including jackets, but most of her work focuses on custom pieces.
The Rangers didn’t make the postseason this year, but Trocheck designed playoff sweaters for the Ottawa Senators. She sources from retailers including Zara and H&M, and then adds bespoke details. She offers non-custom versions for both adults and kids on the Statement Threads online shop, for $275 and $250, respectively. She also designed the Team USA jackets for 4 Nations Face-Off: custom Alo Yoga bomber jackets with the names and numbers of each player.
“The ladies came to me with a design idea, and I had somebody help me digitally, and then we went back and forth on a couple of iterations,” she tells FOS. Usually, she says, the process doesn’t start until teams clinch playoff spots. For Ottawa’s sweaters, she spent more than an hour with a commercial-grade embroidery machine on each of the 36 pieces. All in all, her raw materials cost $50 and she sold each for $200.
Although the $4 billion women’s sports merch market is expanding, WAGs items live in their own realm—they’re not available for purchase, so instead create a kind of aspirational, almost voyeuristic social media sensation.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the best time of the year is here, and that is playoffs,” one TikTok user posted in April. “It is not because of the game. It’s because of the jackets.”
