Julius Young — Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Vantage
Jacquemus dressed France. Palace dressed England. LVMH bought the ceremony. The 2026 World Cup is where luxury decided that sport is the new runway.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being played across North America, and the luxury industry showed up to it like it was Paris Haute Couture Week. Jacquemus designed the pre-match jersey for France. Palace dressed England. Kith and Adidas released a Messi capsule. Nike worked with the Virgil Abloh Archive for the United States kit. LVMH is embedded in trophy presentations and the kind of brand positioning that television spots cannot deliver since the audience migrated away from linear TV.
This is not athleisure. It is the strategic annexation of sport as a platform for selling aspiration to a demographic younger, more globally distributed, and less interested in traditional luxury codes than any previous generation. The World Cup draws four billion viewers over the tournament. No fashion week reaches that scale with that level of emotional engagement. When a viewer watches Mbappe sprint in a Jacquemus-signed kit, the brand is being experienced, not advertised. The houses winning this repositioning treat sport as a language, not a marketing channel. Related: The Logo Is Over and NIL Turned College Athletes Into Brands