Lauren Elshoz doesn’t need to set foot in Delta Center to understand Utah’s newest fashion trend.
She lives it, every day, right in her own home.
A proud Utah Mammoth season ticket holder and longtime hockey fan, Elshoz married a fellow hockey fanatic who plays in rec leagues. Her husband bought different NHL jerseys from across the league, of franchises he had no connection to. The problem: he just never seemed to take them off.
“He will wear them all the time. Not just here. But he’ll wear them out to dinner,” she said, noting he’s added Mammoth gear to the rotation.
“I think it’s a hockey thing. You get one and you just wear it.”
Elshoz isn’t alone. As the Stanley Cup playoffs make their debut in Salt Lake City this week, Mammoth sweaters have become akin to a required uniform for fans.
It’s unlike nearly any other American sport. When the Mammoth put their jersey on sale for the first time last year, it was the highest single-day sports event sales record ever at the Delta Center.
Even with sweaters running close to $300 a pop, they were flying off the shelves. It’s clear: the sweater is the style.
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“I think you want to get closer to the players, that’s why I do it,” Jeff Grace said, who dons a Logan Cooley jersey. “Everybody can single out a player they really like. It helps me relate to the players. I get more into it.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Mammoth fans in front of the Delta Center before the season opener against the Calgary Flames.
You will see basketball jerseys in the crowd at Utah Jazz games.
But the hockey sweater phenomenon might be a little more involved than just a connection to the team.
After all, hockey sweaters became so fashionable that Tommy Hilfiger created his own line of jerseys for people to wear outside the rink.
“I used to look at all the hockey uniforms and loved the way all of the letters and numbers were sewn on. I liked the strength of the material and I liked the different colorways — I was obsessed with it,” Hilfiger said.
It wasn’t an accident. According to Bruce Berglund, who wrote a book on hockey’s globalization, the popularity of sweaters stems from a marketing ploy. In the 1980s and ′90s, teams brought in marketing specialists to test optimal logos and colorways to attract fans to wear jerseys. Franchises modernized their look and made logos even non-hockey fans would be drawn to.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Mammoth fans cheer after a goal earlier this season.
Combined with a few popular players like Wayne Gretzky, wearing hockey jerseys became in vogue. Celebrities wore them and the logos were a fashion statement.
The “first [franchise to do it] were the Los Angeles Kings, who introduced a new logo and color scheme in 1988, the same time they traded for hockey’s biggest star, Wayne Gretzky,” Berglund wrote for the University of California Press.
“With a new logo and colors, Kings gear became a fashion statement. Queen Latifah and members of NWA donned the black-and-silver caps. By the mid-1990s, hockey jerseys were standard apparel among hip-hop artists, with the shirts of different teams appearing in videos by Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J.”
The San Jose Sharks tested the color teal in marketing studies and plastered it on uniforms, Berglund added. It worked so well that Prince William started appearing in Sharks gear with no connection to the sport, Burglund said.
“Photos of NHL crowds from the early ‘90s show that most fans didn’t give second thought to what they wore,” Burgland wrote. “Check out the crowd at the 1993 Stanley Cup finals in Montreal and you see more men in business suits than Canadiens sweaters. A decade later, however, Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena was awash in red and white when the Red Wings won the cup.”
And now Utah is getting its own introduction to that, with fans trying to find their own fashion statements.
Every person’s method is a little unique. The color, player and logo are all critically important. Some fans meticulously try to pick players off the beaten path to make their jersey distinctive. Sporting a Cooley or captain Clayton Keller jersey doesn’t have as much hipster cachet. An original Utah Hockey Club jersey, on the other hand, is worth its weight in gold.
“I always try to be a little unique,” said Tenev Rodgers, who wears a Mikhail Sergachev jersey. “He’s sort of a well-known player. But I have a few unique players.”
Another mark of a jersey’s statement is wearing it on the road. It’s the Mammoth fans’ version of Prince William showing up on a ski trip with a completely unknown logo because it looks weirdly sleek.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Fans shop for merchandise during a preseason game at the Delta Center.
“I went to New York and wore it there,” Rodgers said. “Going to Boston games, Vegas, Colorado, I’d always bring my jersey. It is kinda fun.”
As the playoffs start, the Utah Mammoth sweater will get another massive bump in popularity. People are already noticing the sweater popping up outside the area.
“I’m seeing people wear it in the mall, everywhere,” Elshoz said.
Those obscure jerseys will become more well-known. The sweaters will be ubiquitous with fandom.
And after games this week, win or lose, many more fans will be walking out of Delta Center in a sweater, ready to wear for game four, or at the next dinner party.
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