At the height of his career, legendary Chicago Bulls basketball player Dennis Rodman was often unfairly dismissed as strange and stubborn, but today he's better known as a fashion pioneer, someone who was wildly ahead-of-his time and who had an unwavering vision for his personal style. His fashion choices at the time encompassed a kind of gender fluidity and sex positivity that was radical compared to his NBA counterparts. But what stood out most was his genuine authenticity and embracing of the bizarre.
Who is Dennis Rodman?
Dennis Keith Rodman is an American former professional basketball player, best known perhaps for his time with the Chicago Bulls in the National Basketball League (NBA). Standing tall at six-foot-eight, his biography on the official NBA website states that he is "arguably the best rebounding forward in NBA history".
His off-the-court life eclipsed much of his sporting successes at times, including a brief six months he spent married to Madonna, frequently spending his weekends between training and games at local gay bars, wearing women's clothing to red carpets, and attending a book signing in a wedding dress because he "married himself". He quickly became a poster child for gaudy brands like Von Dutch and Ed Hardy; a trailblazer even if he didn't know it.
Dennis Rodman's style
In the more than two decades since the zenith of Rodman's celebrity, he's become something of a fashion icon, from his legendary talk show appearances, where he donned sheer, black, floral-patterned burnout blouse and hair-sprayed David Letterman's locks a matching shade of slime green, to his signature Oakley wraparound sunglasses and leopard print buzzcuts.
These days, you’d be hard pressed to find a more apt modern style muse than Rodman's 90s style – particularly as we herald in another era of vintage Y2K revival – so we thought we'd recount some of our favourite Dennis Rodman style moments from over the years.
