PDF’s Spring/Summer 2027 Collection Reimagines 90s Basketball Style

Domenico Formichetti launched PDF in 2021 with a straightforward proposition: to make things that do not yet exist. Five years later, that idea came into focus at New York Fashion Week, where PDF’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection turned the brand’s fascination with basketball into a full-scale statement about fashion, music, and community. Staged inside a space built to resemble a basketball court, the show brought together the worlds that have shaped PDF’s identity from the start, with athletes and entertainers sharing the runway as equals.

That community has already given PDF a cultural reach that most young labels spend years trying to build. Drake received a haul at his Toronto mansion, Rihanna was photographed in one of the label’s orange bomber jackets, and Doja Cat and 21 Savage have worn custom pieces on stage. NFL running back Alvin Kamara has walked in the runway shows, while Lil Yachty has been repping the brand since near the beginning. So when PDF made its New York Fashion Week debut on September 12, it was not arriving as an unfamiliar name. It was bringing an established network of artists, athletes, and collaborators into a new setting.

Lil Yachty’s role extended beyond walking the show. He styled and prepped models for the runway, helping translate Formichetti’s vision into something that felt inhabited rather than performed. Central Cee sat front row, while the casting brought together names including Rich The Kid, CAMO, FT Gio, Lo Shimmy, Marcus Allen, Zay, Jorjiana, Eris, Liz Cambage, Faith, and TJ. The mix was deliberate: for PDF, the connection between basketball and culture is not a styling reference but a lived language that has linked sports, music, identity, and fashion for decades.

PDF Turns 90s Basketball Into Something Louder

The collection drew from the visual codes of 1990s basketball, oversized uniforms, graphic statements, and athletic proportions, and then stretched them until they became something different. Sportswear got bigger, looser, and louder. Performance clothing shed its technical seriousness and became attitude. Proportion was the primary form of expression throughout, and it came across less as dressing for the game and more as dressing for everything that happens around it.

Embellishment elevated the sportswear foundation at every turn. Basketball player Liz Cambage wore a red jersey-inspired mini dress embroidered entirely with pearls. Rapper Free Ackrite wore a varsity jacket covered in rhinestones. Other pieces arrived in bold patterned fabrics such as faded checks, camouflage, and animal prints, bringing street flair to the fore without abandoning the collection’s athletic backbone. The casting itself reinforced the point: Lil Yachty, Rich The Kid, CAMO, FT Gio, Lo Shimmy, Marcus Allen, Zay, Jorjiana, Eris, Liz Cambage, Faith, and TJ walked together, athletes and musicians sharing a runway without hierarchy.

Champion Brings Its Own Sportswear History

PDF used the Spring/Summer 2027 show to debut a collection in collaboration with Champion, and the timing makes sense. Champion is one of the few sportswear labels with cultural credibility that predates the current athletic-aesthetic revival, having been worn by everyone from 1990s hip-hop artists to college athletes for decades. The collaboration manifests in colorful retro nylon tracksuits and star-emblazoned basketball jersey-and-shorts sets, pieces that feel like they belong in the collection’s world rather than sitting alongside it as a commercial add-on.

The partnership also signals where PDF is positioning itself as a brand. Formichetti has been consistent about preferring collaborations with brands that have genuine community relationships over those with prestige associations. “I want to collab with brands like this rather than high-end brands,” he said in an earlier interview. “I feel like these brands have more of a community.” Champion has that community in full. The tracksuits and jerseys from the partnership reflect it.

A New York Debut Built Around PDF’s Community

The New York Fashion Week debut is a meaningful moment for a brand that started in Milan and has grown primarily through cultural proximity rather than conventional fashion-industry pathways. PDF does not rely on press coverage to build its audience. It relies on the people wearing it, and those people have a reach that most emerging brands spend years trying to manufacture. The PDF Spring/Summer 2027 show was structured as a confirmation of that approach rather than a departure from it: the same community, the same energy, given a bigger stage.

What Formichetti is doing with PDF is not inventing a new aesthetic. It is recognizing the cultures that already exist and giving them a new shape. The SS27 show did not ask the audience to look at basketball. It asked them to look at the world basketball created, and made a strong case that the world has always been a fashion statement.