Distinguished English professor recognized for stitching together timeline of NBA fashion

Little did Mitchell Jackson know that his special interest would land him in front of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Commissioner, Adam Silver, and on a red carpet. Jackson, the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and a Pulitzer Prize winner, combined his love for basketball and fashion in his 2023 book “Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion.” A year later, the historical run-through of the NBA’s biggest style eras has won an award for the best lifestyle coffee-table book of 2024.

Booktique, the host of the annual award, spotlights must-have coffee books that deepen a reader’s connection to the world. Seven books are chosen as winners across categories such as art and design, home interiors and performing arts to name a few.

Jackson’s eye for unique threads started during his days playing basketball in junior college when his friend became an NBA lottery draft pick. A surge in hip-hop’s popularity was kicking up and Jackson saw how its influences began conflicting with the NBA’s former standards for how they wanted their players to look.

“I started to get more of an intimate knowledge and relationship with the NBA,” Jackson said. “I started going to a few games. I started seeing the players and how they dress and what they were interested in,

“They're wearing all the hip-hop stuff around the Allen Iverson era. They have braids, some of them were getting into legal troubles. I wasn’t just paying attention to it. I was living through that with them. So years later when the idea was brought to me, it reminded me of that experience and why it was important to frame it,” Jackson said.

Shortly before the book’s release, Jackson received an email from Silver commending his work. In fact, he liked it so much, Silver sent copies of the book to every team in the league and invited Jackson to last year’s NBA Cup Finals red carpet where the book was also handed out to guests of the event.

“To get that [compliment] from the commissioner –– I never expected that,” said Jackson. “I can't think of a more important reflection of what the book meant than to have the commissioner of the NBA buy it himself, read it and then say ‘I'm sending this to all the NBA teams,’

“It really made me feel like I did the right thing because the NBA got behind the book. I met commissioners — the owner of the Golden State Warriors emailed me and said ‘I love this book,’” he said.

Jackson reflected on what writing this book meant to him and how it came to be.

Q: ​​What was the process like for you making this book and going back through that history?

A: It was a tremendous education because I never thought to research when and why the NBA started. I knew I had to go to the beginning, which meant a lot of research and I was thankful because the same process that I use to write a column or write a feature piece, I used to write this book. So what's the question I am interested in? What era am I researching? How do I look at all of these different things? That’s what it was like for every chapter. I was gonna do it by years, but then I thought the years don't necessarily mark an era. So just because I say 1970 to 1980, it doesn't mean that there was something significant in the culture that made things shift. So then I had to decide what the shifts were and when they occurred.

I have a mentor who used to remind me how you do anything is how you do everything. I think that principle was at work in how I shaped this book. That’s how I write a feature story and how I research for a novel. Writing a historical novel is the same way that I would do research and think about the framing of this book.

Q: What would you say is your favorite era?

A: My first favorite is ‘The Beginning’ because that's the one I knew the least about. I was discovering the history of basketball and also the history of America in a way that I never thought about. There was World War II and clothing conservation — you couldn't have a certain amount of rubber in your shoe or leather, or you could only have a certain amount of suits and the fabric was different. I had never thought to frame what was happening in the war with what was happening in America in fashion.

The second favorite era is probably the Allen Iverson era, because that's when I had an intimate relationship with that. I remember going to All-Star weekend in Philadelphia at the height of Iverson. He's a Sixer and there was actually a party that he’s hosting. Iverson is on a ledge standing with his crew and about 2,400 people are looking up at him. He gets down and walks to the other side of the party, he gets up high on the ledge, and the whole party shifts. All these people immediately follow him and I can just remember looking at that and going, wow. He is the center of everyone's attention in this room and it was miraculous to me to be able to see that. Having lived through lots of those moments, it really made that era more personal for me.

Q: What did writing this book mean to you?

A: Writing the book started off as almost not that consequential for me. I didn't think people were going to take it very seriously. I was like, ‘Oh, it's a coffee table book on fashion and people don't treat fashion very seriously.’ But I also know that's a part of my career and so I thought again, how you do anything is how you do everything. I wrote this book with the same attention to sentence making, intellectual curiosity and structure that I would when I wrote my novel and that I am writing my next novel with. Don't just mail it in because you don't think that this is a subject people are going to treat seriously. I think it made me feel proud that I was the first person to do it. This is the first book on NBA fashion, and to have it be received well in the culture meant something to me.