“If you look good, you feel good, you do good,” Richardson told Nylon in June. “I feel that way on and off the track.” And as she told the Grio, she hopes her meet-day drip shows that athletes don’t need to look a certain way to be taken seriously: “Athletes can be fashionable just as much as they can be athletes,” she said. “Fashion and sports are one [and] the same…an expression of self, an expression of flow.”
And if there’s a way that athletes can tap into this while keeping their performance top of mind, well, even better. When I entered the “vision activation” room at Nike Athlete House, I was met with shelves and shelves of sunglasses, some purely for fashion, others specifically for performance, that athletes could pick from. I got to chatting with the designer there, and we started talking about barriers to sunglasses use—a popular (and personal, for me) one being that so many bounce all over the place when you’re running. But then he shared another factor I didn’t even think of: If your eyes are done up in full glam mode (say, with fake lashes), a lot of glasses won’t sit right—there’s just not enough room between lash and lens, which makes some athletes simply shelve their sun protection.
So they designed the Victory Elite sunglasses with glammed-up lashes in mind: The nose pads are adjustable and slightly longer than typical ones, so the frame sits further away from your face, allowing a little more room for eyelashes. That way, athletes don’t need to choose between something that can aid their performance—as steeplechaser Valerie Constien told me after her first-place finish at the Trials, the glasses help reduce the glare from the water pit, helping her gauge her jump better—and the glam that makes them feel competition-ready.
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It’s not just track stars (or Nike athletes) who are embracing exuberant self-expression. LSU head basketball coach Dawn Staley told Refinery29 that wearing nails, lashes, and makeup is “so important” to her players; USC Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams has been painting his nails since his last year of high school; and when SELF asked Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher to list the must-have items in her self-care kit, she picked long-lasting lipstick that she could wear to her games as one of them.
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“Lipstick was kind of my own way to be like, I can tackle and I can run hard and stiff-arm, but I can also feel feminine and be myself,” she told SELF. “So that’s really important to me.”
Gymnast Jordan Chiles—who favors bright embellished leos, long lashes, and eyeliner, and even showed off her long, bedazzled blue and white press-ons in her official Olympic roster photo—echoes those sentiments too.
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