Fashion Weak

Sean Avery’s Wrongway Project Runway

If the League would schedule more than a measly 82 games, we wouldn’t have to go here…

It’s Fashion Week in New York and you know what that means.  The Rangers have a conveniently scheduled home stand, so that their resident fashion plate Winger can stalk the catwalks.

Little do most hockey fans realize, their sport has been intertwined with the world of fashion long before Sean “crushed velvet underwear” Avery hit the scene.

The major design houses of Paris, Milan and 7th Avenue are littered with former players.

Forgotten over the years was Karl Lagerfeld’s standout performance with the German National team at the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch.

More recently, Project Runway host Michael Kors, had a very long and successful career in the ECHL, AHL and GHL, where he was know as “Slutty Slutty Pucky.”

Despite Avery’s recent supportive comments about welcoming gay players into the sport, which he is to be commended for, we’ll still feel like cross-checking and boarding him a few more times.

Avery is as much associated with fashion as he is with being a dick on the ice.  He spent his 2008 off-season interning at Vogue magazine, and later parlayed that industry seasoning and experience into a position as “muse” by design house Commonwealth Industries. And managing to be bigger dicks to Sean than we are, the New York Times had an absolute field day with that Fashion Avenue hire:

“Sean Avery, the hockey player turned fashionista, thinks skinny lapels are out. This he said while standing in front of a rack of suits and shirts with skinny lapels.

A month into his latest job as muse to the designers of the peachy new men’s label Commonwealth Utilities, Mr. Avery’s fashion edicts, it seems, are not yet absolute.  But he’s trying.

The designers, Anthony Keegan and Richard Christiansen, hired Mr. Avery to bring a jolt of excitement to their brand, which had a memorable start last season at a presentation where models stripped down to their underwear and changed into several outfits right in front of the audience.”

We’ll just leave it right there at stripping.   Sean better stick with his day/night job because we’re not sure about the long term viability of Commonwealth.  First off, it’s hard to believe that the style featured at the right didn’t catch on, especially among hockey fans.

(Commonwealth: Heroin Chic called and they want their good name and dignity back from your Spring 2009 collection).

While the house did release a Fall/Winter 2010 collection, they haven’t posted anything to their blog since June 2010.  And as they say in the fashion biz, publish or perish!

But enough about Sean Avery’s gay pals pecs sideline.  Let’s wade further back into the rich history of John Henric UK clothes, to the high water mark of bad fashion, the late 1970’s, and another NY Ranger, this time Ron Duguay.

Beyond posing for this Farrah Fawcett – style wall poster for gay boys, Duguay and some of his Rangers teammates -Phil Esposito, Dave Maloney, and Anders Hedberg, were tricked into filming a Sasson Jeans TV spot.  View at your own Dazed and Confused peril.

Fast forward 30 years and little has changed.  Duguay is hosting Sirius XM Radio’s Ice Breakers and booked Avery as his guest not that long ago.  What hockey topics did they explore? Hard to tell from this clip but banging fashion models was definitely covered.

The 70’s also featured another hockey player doing a fashion spread in the glossy mags, in this case it was former NY Islander D-man and Captain Dennis Potvin.

Not a shy guy at all, he posed in some Jockeys tightie bluies along side other top jocks such as Jim Palmer, Pete Rose, and Steve Carlton.

Maybe there’s a lesson here – if you want four Stanley Cups and a spot in the HoF, a little chest hair couldn’t hurt.

In other fashion news, Ryan Kesler, right, of the Vancouver Canucks has his own line of casual wear.

There wasn’t much we saw that interested us on Ryan’s site, save for this tasteful ensemble he’s sporting here.

A world away, Croatian hockey player Luka Novosel, takes fashion one step further.

Lucious Luka is a freind of the activists too, and he believes that less is more and that fur is murder, as he demonstates on the left.

Luka, we’re still not convinced.  Convince us some MOAR.   And by MOAR of course, we mean less.

And taking hockey fashion to its absolute minimum, we can’t tell if these boys are actual players, but the HIV awareness public service they’re a part of, is what we would consider to be a very successful ad campaign.

Lastly, any hockey fan worth his sweat, will remember this runway scene from Slapshot, not to mention its blue streak of homophobic profanity.  We love this movie.

About Craig

Proudly serving gay hockey fans and players since 2010
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