The 2024 Paris Olympics are the most stylish games in Olympics history and it has nothing to do with their stereotypically fashionable host city. Really, it’s all about timing.
Even before the perpetually stylish Pharrell Williams hoisted the Olympics torch to kick off the games, it was clear that the 2024 Olympics athletes were the best-dressed, ever.
Uniforms as disparate as those designed for Sudanese basketball players, American breakdancers and the Mongolian national team blazed across the internet following their reveals in July: No feat of athletic skill needed, just great looks.
Now that things are underway, though it’s not just the tailormade fashion flexes that’re doing work.
There’s immense appeal in the unassuming personal style displayed by Olympic-level skateboarders, for instance.
The enviably slick attitude of Korean shooter Kim Yeji brought undue attention to the air rifle event while the watches the athletes display so casually between games are eye-poppingly wild.
It all compounds to a simple fact: the 2024 Olympics are, by far, the Olympics games with the best style.
But how is the 2024 Olympics such a feast for the eyes, when slick uniforms and custom-made get-ups are Olympic tradition?
It’s a matter of where we were back then and where we are now.
Specifically, the four-year gap between the Olympics games is crucial.
So many cultural shifts happen in the span of only a few years that a nearly half-decade between events may as well be an eternity in terms of language, interest, culture.
The 2016 Olympics, the last “normal” games, occurred eight years ago — the fashion POV that existed back then has been obliterated since, replaced with a wholly new perspective on wearing clothes.
Back then, we were in the early days of Demna’s Balenciaga and a year out from Louis Vuitton’s Supreme collab and appointment of Virgil Abloh. Musical.ly was the hot new app and had not yet been spun into the burgeoning TikTok, which itself had little to no presence outside of China at the time.
I mean, eight years ago, the biggest trends in menswear were bomber jackets and ripped skinny jeans.
The global conception of fashion, style and trends was far more tame. Now, monoculture has been shattered and everything exists everywhere at once.
Then, the 2020 Olympics were undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic. Eventually held in 2021, the athletic performances took center stage; the clothes weren’t even a secondary concern.
But now, with the world (somewhat) stabilized by comparison, there’s more opportunity to take in the entire scale of Olympics style.
The 2024 Olympics are the first semi-normal games since 2016 and cultural clothing consumption — both literal and metatextual — has advanced by lightyears.
As such, there’s far more social media adeptness, far more willingness to extrapolate intrigue in the clothes the athletes wear on and off the stage.
As such, the 2024 Olympics are merely the most stylish Olympics thus far. Expect much more from the games in 2028.