The Power of Styling in Sports


“I started styling pretty much from the time I understood clothes,” says Manny Jay, a stylist who grew up in Lancaster, a small city in South Central Pennsylvania, before moving to New York to begin his professional career. “I would say about 6 or 7.” At that age, most parents still dressed their kids, but his gave him the freedom to express himself. Soon, Jay was styling half of Lancaster, from his mom and sister to his friends. When social media began its rise, he joined platforms like MySpace and Facebook, building a presence that eventually led to him meeting the founders of eyewear brand Coco and Breezy. “They were really popping at the time,” Jay says. “They told me, ‘You’re styling. This is a career—we know other stylists who make a lot of money doing this.'” Being from a small town, he never knew his passion could double as a job. Quickly, Jay packed up and moved to the city, assisting whatever stylist would hire him and eventually working with icons of the fashion industry such as Patricia Field and Law Roach.

Now, Jay is off on his own, and over the last year, he’s broken into one of the fastest-growing cultural corners of the world: women’s basketball. Since November 2024, Jay has had one of the WNBA’s best dressed players on his client sheet, Skylar Diggins-Smith. Diggins-Smith, a guard on the Seattle Storm and Unrivaled’s Lunar Owls basketball club, is known for her competitive nature on the court and elevated taste off it. For the second time, Diggins-Smith was named 2024’s MVP by League Fits after garnering the title first in 2022. The two met ahead of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, an event Diggins-Smith, a Puma ambassador, attended with the brand. “The synergy was instant,” she says.

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(Image credit: Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images)

According to the six-time WNBA All-Star, Jay’s eye for detail was one of the first things that drew her to his work. That and she says he understands her implicitly while pushing her out of her comfort zone at every opportunity. For her, working with Jay was about more than just putting together a great outfit. “It was about creating a narrative that resonates,” she says.