Fast Fashion

Like cornerbacks, test pilots, and heart surgeons, elite track athletes pursue a career wherein one's victories and failures are inarguable matters of empirical public record, and often determined by variables so small—a quarter of an inch, a half a step, a hundredth of a second—as to be practically invisible. Such challenges require as much mental strength and precision as they do physical power and speed. To maintain that edge, runners and hurdlers (and pilots and surgeons) might wrap themselves, like one would with a blanket or a bulletproof vest, in ego or in routine. Some prefer a more literal suit of parade armor—loud, rococo, King Henry II of France protection.

And that's where fashion—no, not fashion, style—comes in! The sprinter dons chains, diamond studs, special spikes, has hair and nails and make-up done, the confidence gleaned from a lucky accessory or last approving glance in the mirror what wins him or her that dread hundredth of a second.

The fashion of track and field, like the fashion of everyday life, serves numerous purposes—a good thing to keep in mind while the latest styles from Fashion Week emerge this week. It is, like all personal fashion choices, a projection of your self. It also can be a key component of your very livelihood, a way to build your brand and protect it against the viciousness of a clock, the rival, the millions of people looking at and yelling for or against you. It can even be, you know, fun.

"For me, individuality has always been very important," said DeeDee Trotter, the three-time Olympic medalist—two golds for the 4x400 relay and a bronze in the 400—and a Wilhelmina model, to boot. With her always-immaculate hair and her glittering makeup, Trotter continues in a grand tradition of serious athletes with serious style.

"It relates to wanting to stand out, aside from just being a stand-out athlete," she said by phone from Atlanta. "Standing out for your visual style, or however you like to express yourself, whether it's with tattoos or, like me, with glitter and some type of pizzazz."

Arguably the most iconic outfit in track and field history is the simplest one, as well: the golden spikes of Michael Johnson's 1996 Atlanta Olympics campaign, the most famous shoes in sport. They were marvels of technology, exceedingly light but more important they were a screaming of confidence, a pounding of the chest—that atavistic, universal body language of dominance—even as they pounded into the track. And yet Johnson and his shoes are far from the most fashionable moment in track and field; they are not even the most fashionable world record run, truth be told. That honor belongs to Florence Griffith-Joyner setting the women's 100-meter record—a voltaic 10.49!—at the quarterfinals of the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis in 1988, a record yet to be broken.

The dash is shot through with controversy, with whispers and questions about aids, be it the strong wind at the track that day or the rumors of doping that plagued Flo-Jo's career. What is irrefutable is how she looked: not just victorious but incredible, equal parts Amazon and amazing as she screamed away from her peers in a flash, her right leg completely covered in an asymmetric purple, her other one bare, her wrists encircled in chains and fingertips bathed in fire. With one of the greatest feats ever performed by a human body in an outfit that would not look out of place on Nicki Minaj, Flo-Jo proved that one could be serious about both performance and personal style. Triumph!

Sports had been associated with fashion before, of course, but the all white of Wimbledon and the navy blue blazers of Ted Turner and a million other sailors were signifiers less of a personal than a certain categorical divide. Griffith-Joyner and Johnson showed that the most populist of all sports, track and field, could have style, too, albeit one dedicated to the power of an individual.

Trotter's addition to the track and field pantheon is her "war paint": the clinquant pattern of glitter paint and stick-on sequins that adorn her cheek and temple during her biggest races. She broke out the look during a rough time in her career, when she was trying to return to the track after having knee surgery in 2008.

"My runner's self-esteem was a little low," Trotter said. "I was in need of some encouragement, because it was a hard struggle being out there with people running super fast, and you used to run just like them, and now you're kind of on the back burner, running kind of slow. You're giving it everything you've got but you're not able to do what you used to do, and I was a little discouraged.

"So I needed something to help me feel like I hadn't lost everything, and people could still be like, 'There's DeeDee Trotter. She's fighting her way back.'"

Inspired by a trip to Disneyland, where she had got her face painted, Trotter sought to recreate that joyful feeling on the track. She was also helped by her appearance on a Knoxville version of Dancing with the Stars: the glitter applied to her legs would simply not come off, no matter how many showers she took. Armed with a sweat-proof product that could bring her look to life, Trotter put on her war paint. It helped buoy her, to provide the edge that a difficult season and substandard—most important, substandard to her—performance nearly ground off.

Trotter has believed in the mantra "Look good, feel good, play good," ever since she was child playing basketball. The nature of outdoor track and field, however, can present some challenges.

"It messes with my glam factor," she said. "I strategically have to work very hard to make sure that my hair is winning out there on the track. It's not easy to do! You're running around— you're literally running around—flopping up and down for hours, in the heat, sweating, rain, whatever comes your way, and you hair has to be able to take that.

"Now see weave … weave is the answer," Trotter continued. "It does not respond to all these horrible, horrible outdoor elements! It stays intact." A good weave, like the kinky curly one Trotter had from her sponsor Gajarah Hair, allows her to feel glamorous with a minimum of worry.

And if for some reason the elements align and the do does not?

"This is where a true diva is going to come into play," Trotter said. "Do you have a mirror in your spike bag? Do you? Do. You? I do. So whenever I'm out there, I have several things in my spike bag that would probably not be in your typical spike bag: I have a mirror. I also have a pair of little baby scissors … My spike bag has lip gloss, lipstick, lip liner." In essence, she has everything she could possible need for a touch up.

"Which is really weird," she conceded.

For someone for whom personal can mean as much as Trotter, the constant uniforms—from her college days at Tennessee to her days under sponsorship contract—chaffed. Watch any given professional meet, and one will see ersatz teams—Nike runners in this color, Adidas in that—as the manufacturers consume the vast majority of the runner's canvas for themselves.

"The difficulty I had being in a professional sport … where you are supposed to stand out for being who you are individually, is that when you are with one of the shoe companies or sponsors … your uniform is pretty much the same as anyone else who works for that company," Trotter said. "Any unique that you want to have, or any type of personal swagger that you want to bring to the track with you, you kind of lose that a little bit."

When Trotter found herself between contracts, the fear of working without her financial safety net was somewhat alleviated by the sudden freedom. Able to create whatever uniform she wanted, Trotter unveiled designs like a long-sleeve crop top. The middle-distance runner Maggie Vessey, too, has taken her lack of uniform sponsor and turned it into a shining exhibition of herself. Her uniforms, featuring elaborate cut outs, loud prints, and colors and lines that would make Paris proud, are her; that is Maggie Vessey running around the track, not New Balance. The fashion world, including The Cut, has taken notice.

Another sartorial standout on the track is Fawn Dorr. It would be next to impossible to miss the Canadian 400m hurdler, from her tattoos to her sunglasses to her armada of hairstyles—an enormous vibrant pompadour, or slicked-back and selachian. This represents something of an evolution for Dorr: photos from her collegiate career at Penn State show an athlete as understated as her school's navy-and-white uniforms, her hair a nice bump and a long tail. The first thing she did as a pro was to shave off half of it.

"I've always been into fashion," Dorr said. "I wore lipstick all through high school…. I don't even know if I wore a pair of flats to high school those last two years. I was always in high-heeled shoes."

(There was none of the sweatpants-and-hoody, freshly-rolled-out-of-the-lofted-bed mode de sommeil so comfortably adopted by her classmates at Penn State. "Oh HELL no!" she said when asked if she wore sweatpants; boots and stilettos do not mix well with cotton-poly blends.)

Athletes—and female athletes in particular—must walk a fine line between being singularly stylish and being marketable to the widest segments of the population. To Dorr, there are two huge swaths of personalities that corporations see on the track. You have athletes such as herself, Vessey, or the magnificently inked high jumper Inika McPherson—"Those athletes that stick out because they are unique or strange"—and more conventional "girl next door" athletes like Alyson Felix.

"Billboard type of women," Dorr calls them (and not, it should be noted, in a derogatory way). "Amazing performance with amazing, easily marketable looks."

"When you start to make yourself look unique, the unfortunate part is that you actually limit your marketability," Dorr said. "Because the only people that want you are the people that then can capitalize on your unique look. Not everyone is going to be doing runway modeling; not everyone is looking for the newest, strangest thing. Some people want that cookie-cutter girl that smiles on the side of a Wheaties box.

"I am not a Wheaties box girl. I know that. I am something else."

Both Trotter and Dorr are extremely cognizant of their brands; like all individual sport athletes, their brand is key to having as robust a career as possible, something to augment their performance with. The brand they show—or do not show—helps collect and keep sponsors, which in turn keeps them on the track. It is also how they touch the majority of their fan's lives.

The well-curated social media image is a powerful tool, especially for someone like Dorr, who has a following and pull that is rare for non-Olympians. Her social media savvy—engendered by a prescient former coach, Matt Moran—has allowed Dorr to carve a space within track and field, both financially and with the fans, independent of Olympic gatekeeping. "The world is going to see me by how I present myself, which is on Twitter and Instagram and when I go to the track" she said. "But that is a calculated illusion. That is not … It's what I want people to feel when they see me. I want people to be intimidated by me, or I want people to notice me, all of those things, specifically because that is the nature of the sport that we are in.

"As a person, I don't see myself as intimidating or reckless or this crazy fashionista; I don't look at myself that way, I'm just living the life in the way that I want to live it. And how other people are perceiving it, that is up to them. But there is a disconnect between who I feel I am, and how I feel that other people see me."

Dorr strives to present an image that is not only honest about being a brand—a rarity—but also is an uplifting brand, a font of positivity which she hopes inspires and helps others and which helps her when the inevitable detractors and aggressors appear on social media.

"I can literally affect people," Dorr said of her public persona, which is both outspoken, powerful, and, at times, vulnerable. "And that is a huge honor and a responsibility, a moral responsibility. At the end of the day, I have to accept that the same thing that can make me strong—how sensitive I can be, or how emotional and intellectual—is the same thing that can destroy me."

Which brings everything full circle—apologies—to that most common and iconic of sprinter accessories: the sunglasses. Trotter, for her part, does not like them; she tried wearing them when seeking out that special flair she eventually found in face paint, and found them distracting. Dorr wears them for herself.

"Your eyes are the window to your soul," Dorr said. "Supposedly. You can understand or feel fear, or happiness, or sadness, or a whole plethora of emotions just by looking somebody in the eyes. That can make somebody extremely vulnerable, so a lot of people wear sunglasses—myself included—to avoid being seen. Now, I don't mean physically seen obviously…. To be truly seen for who I am, what I am, and how I feel, is something that I am unwilling, or uncomfortable, to experience on a public scale."

There is, after all, a place where Fawn Dorr (or DeeDee Trotter or Inika McPhereson or Maggie Vessey or or Michael Johnson or Florence Griffith-Joyner) the athlete and even the image ends, and the person begins. Where the string unwinds, frays, can breathe. That line is drawn in their fashion choices, in their personal styles, and it is sequestered behind them as well. When the numbers and medals and accolades do not come, when the athlete fails and the person lives on, it is what will be left of them.

"People can't have everything," Dorr said. "They can't have all of me."