Has 'Shrink it and Pink it' Finally Met Its Demise?

Women comprise more than 40% of the National Football League’s audience, yet most of the licensed team wear available in women’s sizes has been, to put it kindly, terrible. No more.

The league is finally abandoning its tired ladyfashion strategy in favor of something more accessible. The Green Bay Press-Gazette,

When the NFL first introduced its clothing line for female fans a decade ago, it was all about taking a standard-issue, guy-sized Packers jersey, shrinking it to fit a woman, dying it pink and bedazzling it. But in the last three or four years, the league has taken a much more savvy and sophisticated approach to a line that leans more flexible everyday fashion and less game day-only gear.

The designs will be marketed by an ad campaign featuring wives and daughters of NFL coaches and team management and advertised on a national scale.

The ads, which also feature Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ daughter, Charlotte Jones Anderson, and Sarah Harbaugh, wife of San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh, will appear in such magazines as Shape, People, In Style, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and In Touch Weekly.

The clothing are versatile as well. Says someone trying a little too hard to market the brand,

“In Green Bay, perhaps a woman there may pair the tee with her jeans and some cute Green Bay earrings and a great Green Bay handbag. Where someone in New York might wear it with a suit and high heels,” [a marketing spokeswoman] said. “Everybody’s able to express it the way they want to.”

Yeah. Maybe someone in New York might wear a Green Bay Packers tee shirt with a suit and high heels.

Far fetched nature of the claims of sartorial versatility aside, for the female fan who wants to wear the colors of her favorite team without looking like a tragic glitter/Pepto Bismo accident, this is good news. Maybe someday NFL clothing for women will be modeled by actual female coaches or team executives! (Just kidding! That’s crazy talk.)

No word on whether the less-tacky and bedazzled designs make a ladies’ Ben Roethlisberger jersey more or less ironic.

Green Bay Packers’ Daughters Model NFL Women’s Fashions [Green Bay Press-Gazette]