Why the NBA All-Star jerseys from 1995 and 96 are still considered the best ever

When Dana Barros returned home from the 1995 NBA All-Star Game, he barely took off his jersey for the next two days. He couldn’t. It was that special.

The vibrant purple, the splotch of orange in a Dali-esque five-sided star, the green cactus. Barros would have been happy to be an All-Star either way — it was the only appearance he made over his 15-year career — but he was elated that the Eastern Conference was the away team that season. That meant, as a 76ers guard, he could wear that jersey.

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“It was dope,” Barros said. “I thought it was something different and something unique. It wasn’t the same old just East-West color combo. The cactus represented where you were at. The purple colors and the orange color scheme … I just thought it was dope to look at.”

More than a quarter of a century later, Barros has no shortage of love for that jersey. He’s not alone. Among the dozens of NBA All-Star Game uniforms, which have ranged from humdrum to aggressively boring to the 2014 jerseys, the ones over a two-year stretch in the mid-1990s remain adored. Not only for their aesthetic but also as avatars of that era.

The 1995 and 1996 jerseys — colorful, brash and idiosyncratic — are fan favorites. They are player favorites. They engender love on social media with every mention, and for some, as a wistful juxtaposition of how bland modern All-Star Game jerseys have become.

“I thought it was a nice uniform,” future Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen told the Chicago Tribune back in ’95. “When I held it up, I thought it was a Phoenix Suns uniform. … It’s a nice color. And it looked good on me too.”

The 1996 jersey, with its turquoise canvas and fuchsia chili pepper stretched across the torsos of Michael Jordan and Penny Hardaway, is an all-timer for its distinctive ode to San Antonio, that year’s host city. It pops like a dance party at Lumon Industries.

This season’s Nike City Edition Spurs uniform is an homage to those fiesta All-Star Game jerseys. Jesse Alvarez, Nike’s product director of men’s basketball, called them an “iconic” design.

“You just think about the players that played in those games,” he said. “A lot of people refer to that as the golden era of basketball. You just think about all the former players and then just how that jersey is always one of the ones that you see on athletes, wearing off-court. So you know that’s a big part of why that jersey is so important.”

Seth Rollins's ring gear at #RoyalRumble an homage to legendary jerseys from the 1996 #NBA All-Star Game played at the San Antonio Alamodome. pic.twitter.com/3WslszAojT

— Mr. Wrestling VI (@wrestling_VI) January 29, 2023

Those jerseys were a gateway to a new generation of possibilities. Before the mid-1990s, All-Star uniforms had either been subtle paeans to the host city or were mostly red and blue and white, and white and red and blue, and on it went, jumbling those colors over and over every year.

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That began to change in the early 1990s when the NBA hired Thomas O’Grady as its first creative director. O’Grady came from FCB, an advertising agency, and he would be the mastermind behind the league’s uniforms for the next 13 years. Before he came along, O’Grady said, team owners or whoever was deputized for the job would pick jerseys from a catalog of different fonts and choices, save for a few exceptions. The creative process was hardly creative; O’Grady eventually built a whole team.

The All-Star Game became a perfect place to experiment and test the boundaries of how jerseys could look. The game was a once-a-year event, and if the jerseys didn’t work, any failure would disappear by the morning after.

The steady drip of innovation began with the 1992 game in Orlando, when the NBA incorporated some of the Magic colors in the jerseys and a logo with five colors instead of two. In 1993, in Utah, the NBA used the Jazz as the base colors for the game’s color scheme.

The jerseys, however, were still basic: home whites and road blues, with a large star at their center. O’Grady wanted to get away from that for 1995.

He designed the logo first, then peeled it apart for the uniforms. The logos were meant to look city-specific, to have a provincialism to a national sport’s marquee weekend. The 1995 jerseys, when the game was in Phoenix, featured Aztec trim along the sides and a sunburst behind the green cactus (the clay red gecko from the logo didn’t make it over). The 1996 jerseys had metallic silver stars as a tribute to the Spurs and a fiesta trim running down the shirt and shorts.

The colors and the combinations were eye-popping and like nothing that had been done before.

“Just to go to that idea was revolutionary,” said Chris Tripucka, the NBA’s director of quality control for licensed products and outfitting. “Everything you saw at the baseball All-Star weekend is basically a take off of what we started. We were the first to do secondary uniforms. Now all the other leagues have secondary uniforms. The All-Star uniforms and changing those, this was big stuff. We didn’t realize how popular it was going to be. We thought it looked great.”

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Tripucka said when he unveiled the jerseys to players for the first time, before practice the day before the game in Phoenix, they went wild. The 1996 uniform was also a hit with players because of the jock tag; it read “1996 NBA All-Star Weekend,” which gave that one a unique flair.

After the game, Tripucka said, players called to try to get more. Replica jerseys, which Tripucka said weren’t great sellers in those days, actually sold well. Today, Mitchell & Ness still carries them.

Tripucka’s only concern with those jerseys was that they were made with twill for the letters and numbers, which made them heavier but felt more authentic than the regular screen printing, but that was no issue. Neither was the fact they had to make the numbers smaller than usual on the front; when he presented that for approval to NBA executive Rod Thorn, he said he was met with apathy.

It was perhaps even more astonishing that this all came during David Stern’s regime. Stern, the longtime NBA commissioner, had a reputation for being occasionally stodgy. O’Grady said Stern was a product of the classic look of the 1970s and the ageless uniform designs of the New York Knicks.

But Stern was always appreciative of O’Grady’s work, and of pushing boundaries. The same goes for Rick Welts, the league’s head of marketing at that time. They wanted to put on a show and let O’Grady take chances, and he reciprocated affection for both.

“They always remind us that we’re competing for the same dollar that a blockbuster movie is competing against,” he said. “We’re competing against Disney. So (Stern) said don’t forget we had to be in entertainment. We just happened to be in the basketball entertainment business. We’re first entertainers, and he always reminded us of that.”

Tripucka credits O’Grady too. It was with O’Grady as its creative director that the NBA started rolling out so many of the jerseys that still resonate today, and that the league and its teams are now reviving as throwbacks.

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The teal Pistons jersey, the Jordan-era Wizards uniforms, the ageless Sonics jerseys, the first-ever Raptors and Grizzlies uniforms — they all debuted during O’Grady’s tenure. “It was fun,” he said. “We were breaking a lot of rules.”

The NBA began to use sublimation to make jerseys during this time. The process, which involves transferring an image onto a white garment at high heat, was not new — it had been used to make dog leashes, Tripucka said — but was novel for the league. It allowed them to incorporate new colors and designs.

“Tom was unbelievable,” Tripucka said. “Tom was great to work with. It took … a little while for him to understand some of the stuff he put on paper couldn’t be made at that time.”

The 1995 and 1996 jerseys are also memorable because they were made by Champion, a dominant 1990s brand. They represent that generation almost as much as Shaq or Charles Barkley or Patrick Ewing. But Champion gave the NBA fits on occasion.

The company would deliver the uniforms late every year, Tripucka said, and equipment managers leaguewide would complain. It bothered Stern enough that he went to Tripucka to tell him to find a new outfitter; instead, after eight years at the league, Tripucka joined Champion as its head of outfitting and worked on the NBA account.

The company regularly pushed the league to increase its signage on jerseys. It had the rights to have its logo on the shorts and waistbands but wanted to have it placed near the NBA logo on the jersey strap too. Tripucka lobbied for it because he thought it was a fair ask. Stern pushed back.

In 1997, Champion lost its exclusivity as the NBA’s jersey manufacturer. Nike and Starter came in and took 19 of the 29 teams between them. Today, Nike outfits the whole league, as it has since 2017 when it took over from Adidas.

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The 1997 All-Star Game saw the end of that renaissance era of jerseys. The NBA shifted to having each player wear their own team’s uniform in the game.

It was a novel look, offering each NBA team represented in the game some national exposure at a time when there was no League Pass or ability for fans to see as much basketball as they do now. Even O’Grady concedes it made sense. In 2003, the league went back to East and West jerseys with a throwback design from the 1980s.

None, however, has popped like the ones O’Grady and Champion developed, or become as instantly recognizable with a time and a place in their fandoms. Many believe that two-year stretch spawned the best All-Star Game jerseys the NBA, or any other sport, has ever produced.

They live on in memories and closets and drawers nationwide. When Tripucka looks back at pictures of those All-Star teams, the impact those jerseys made and how cool they were is clear.

“It looks amazing compared to the team photo with the basic NBA jerseys,” Tripucka said. “It’s night and day. My God.”

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(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Andy Hayt, Scott Cunningham, Nathaniel S. Butler / Getty Images)

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