The U.S. Women’s National Team Kicks off the World Cup With a Tunnel Walk
Soccer and fashion make a great duo
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
World Cup season has a new dress code, and it has nothing to do with face paint. As the tournament opened in Mexico City, Los Angeles threw its own celebration — an Adidas-backed Peso Pluma concert at BMO Stadium — and the U.S. Women's National Team showed up not just as guests, but as the evening's most compelling style story. Jaedyn Shaw, Lily Yohannes, Sam Coffey, Emily Fox, Emily Sams, and Kennedy Wesley made their entrance via tunnel walk, and collectively they made the case that soccer fashion has officially left the pitch and entered the cultural conversation.
The range was the point. Shaw arrived in snakeskin jorts, Sambas, and a Y-3 chain — athletic with an edge. "Look good, feel good, play good," she told Harper's Bazaar, the philosophy that anchored nearly every player's approach to getting dressed. Yohannes echoed it in a cream polo, pleated tennis skirt, and silver sneakers — "girly with a little bit of streetwear touch." Coffey went full Americana in Adidas's U.S. Denim Jersey, mules, and an American flag bandana she styled herself: "funky, eclectic, and unique" was the explicit goal. Wesley wore the same denim jersey cropped, paired with light-wash jeans and Adidas x Bad Bunny ballerina flats in red — denim-on-denim executed with enough confidence to make you forget you ever had an opinion against it.
Why Soccer Style Is Having Its Moment
What's striking isn't just that these women look good — it's that they've built a genuine point of view. Fox gravitates toward color and unexpected pattern; Sams kept it streetwear-minimal with a black bodysuit, baggy jeans, and metallic Taekwondo F50 sneakers. None of it reads like a brand mandate dressed up as personal style. Adidas supplied the pieces, but the players brought the perspective — and the difference is visible.
Soccer's influence on fashion has been building quietly for years: Sambas everywhere, jerseys restyled as going-out tops, the slow canonization of the athletic silhouette as a legitimate aesthetic. But what the USWNT is doing now feels like something more specific — using the World Cup's global spotlight to expand what a female athlete's off-field identity can look like. Not polished and palatable. Confident, a little eccentric, and entirely their own.
The tunnel walk is no longer just a pre-game ritual — it's a declaration that showing up with style and showing up to compete are not separate ambitions.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
