Fashion’s own Heated Rivalry is ramping up. On Tuesday night, the show’s star Connor Storrie (who plays ice hockey star Ilya Rozanov) sat front row for Saint Laurent Men’s Fall/Winter 2026 show, wearing a beige suit and mustard shirt. It follows Hudson Williams (who plays Storrie’s enemy-turned-lover Shane Hollander) walking the ski slope runway at DSquared2 last Friday in Milan, sporting a distressed denim jacket and snow boots (and crashing the brand’s website). Luxury fashion brands are locked in a talent face-off, mirroring the TV show’s own fierce rinkmanship.
The explosively popular drama, adapted from Rachel Reid’s 2019 gay romance novel, follows two stick-wielding enemies as they compete against one another in the rink and hook up on the sly. It’s racked up 600 million minutes of viewing in the US alone — but that figure, recorded last week by The New York Times, has likely already been eclipsed, as the show continues to boom across Europe, following its late European release on January 10. Fans are hosting Heated Rivalry raves on campuses, magnetizing swathes of frenzied college students obsessed with the show. And while the show’s hockey players and teams are fictional, its success could have real-world implications for fashion crossovers in sport.
Poaching Williams was a masterstroke of pop cultural timing from DSquared2’s Dean and Dan Caten (who emerged for the finale in DSquared2 hockey jerseys). “It’s a cameo that worked for so many reasons,” says GQ style editor Mahalia Chang. “DSquared2 is a Canadian brand — Heated Rivalry and Williams are Canadian, too — it was winter themed, and Milan, where they held the show, is just about to host the Winter Olympics where ice hockey is going to be a huge feature. I think Dan and Dean were right on the money.”
Dishin — a Buffalo-based streetwear label founded by Matthew Keeler, who protyped the viral Air Jordan 1 Chicago hockey skates — has collaborated with National Hockey League (NHL) teams including the Chicago Blackhawks, the Detroit Red Wings and the Buffalo Sabres on custom apparel. Elsewhere, Drake’s Ovo and Lululemon have collaborated with the NHL. “Hockey is having a moment, because the visual appearance is so strong and the game is inherently cinematic in all aspects,” Keeler says.
Ice hockey’s tepid style history
This fashion potential may seem incongruous to those into the sport; ice hockey has never been seen as a trendy world. “Fashion didn’t exactly ‘orbit’ hockey, I would say it existed in a separate galaxy. Hockey has always been the silent sport in fashion,” says Keeler. This was partially driven by the rigid dress codes of the NHL. “For nearly a century, hockey has had a mandatory suit and tie dress code that dominated the arrival aesthetic and the NHL remained anchored in a traditionalist team-first mentality that often limited creative expression among its players,” he explains. “If you actually follow hockey, you know that real hockey players have boring style at best, awful style at worst,” Chang adds.
This is reflected in the Heated Rivalry wardrobe, which, especially in the case of normcore enthusiast Shane Hollander (played by Williams), isn’t exactly enviable. “There’s a certain blankness to the style of a lot of professional hockey players. What we see in the show is a lot of press conference suits, athleticwear and hoodies. I wanted it to feel real,” says the show’s costume designer Hanna Puley. No wonder Hollander hires a stylist in the fifth episode, desperate to impress (and probably feeling threatened after Storrie’s character Rozanov rocked a leopard print Jean Paul Gaultier FW98 shirt in the episode before).
