“Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good: Nike Apparel” Celebrates the Power of Women’s Sportswear

Nike is proud to announce the publication of “Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good: Nike Apparel,” a richly illustrated account of women’s sportswear and the significance it’s carried throughout history. Created in collaboration with Phaidon Press, this unprecedented volume maps the development of women’s sports apparel and proves its potential to make us feel our most powerful.

Spanning more than 350 pages and including over 575 images, “Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good” visualizes the relationship between women and the garments they wear through five design archetypes from sporting history: warm-ups, jerseys, leggings, sport bras and shorts.

To fully integrate and center the voice of the athlete, each chapter features interviews with Nike athletes such as Sha’Carri Richardson, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Caster Semenya, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Dina Asher-Smith, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, Scout Bassett and Naomi Osaka. These intimate conversations offer anecdotes about the sportswear, personal items and style approaches that such luminaries cherish and why, while newly commissioned texts consider Nike as part of an overarching sociocultural context within the history of sporting apparel.

Writer, editor and editorial consultant Maisie Skidmore authored the book, and contributing writers include Dal Chodha, the Editor-in-Chief of Archivist Addendum; Michelle Millar Fisher, the Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Heather Radke, an essayist, journalist, and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab; Samantha N. Sheppard, an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Cornell University; and Natalie E. Wright, a historian of design and disability.

The volume’s images are as varied as its many contributors. Steeped in narrative, history and Nike’s abundant archive, the imagery spans reproductions of Nike’s trade catalogues dating to the early 1980s. The book also includes period and contemporary photography, lavish illustrations, sketches, advertisements, fabric swatches, seasonal color palettes, original design proposals and patents, logos, product and campaign shots — and everything in between.

“Whether you’ve followed their journeys or are exploring the trends that have defined women’s sports, ‘Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good’ showcases the work Nike designers have done over the past 50 years to revolutionize and move women’s sport forward,” says Amy Montagne, VP/GM, Nike Women.

To fully integrate the language of garment-making and design, the book features sweeping pattern lines and notch markers as distinct reminders of sporting apparel’s enduring cultural influence. The packaging is equally innovative, with an exposed spine created with two different paper colors to evoke a stack of archive papers. Its cloth-bound case is wrapped in a translucent jacket made of glassine-like material and is printed on both sides, allowing the details of the case to show through.

Taken in its entirety, the volume solidifies the impact of its design archetypes as well as Nike’s commitment to research and development within women’s apparel.

“Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good” is now available for pre-order at Phaidon.com/NikeApparel and will be sold widely December.