Touchdown! Inside the GQ Bowl in New Orleans, Where Football Stars and Supermodels Went from the Bode Runway to the Dance Floor

CeeDee Lamb, Ray-Ray McCloud III, Emily Adams Bode Aujla, Aaron Aujla, and Ja’Marr Chase

“It felt good to get back together, just two wide receivers shooting the shit,” Skinner joked of meeting Cruz on the carpet, where Cruz was co-hosting the GQ Bowl livestream alongside ESPN NFL analyst Mina Kimes. More theater kid than jock, Skinner nevertheless played high school ball in Idaho, material for his buzzy forthcoming A24-produced TV series Overcompensating, where he plays a closeted high school football star. (And where Charli XCX plays herself—another potential inflection point in the crossover between sports, style, and culture.) “It was nice to go back and relive it and be able to laugh at it now,” said Skinner, who wore a designer football jersey by ERL. “It was less traumatic this time around.”

In a sign of just how serious the sport is taking its new relationship with the fashion world, as Skinner found his front row seat in the chapel he was intercepted by Kyle Smith, the NFL’s official fashion editor. They met recently on a flight back from Paris Fashion Week, and Smith wanted to discuss Skinner taking over the NFL Instagram account. “It’s about time!” Skinner declared.

Of any American cultural spectacle, the Super Bowl attracts a particularly powerful cross section of movers and shakers. Under gleaming tin foil stars hanging from the ceiling like the decorations of a high school dance, sports business rainmaker Rich Kleiman caught up with restaurateur to the stars Mario Carbone. A few seats over, “Hot Mess” podcaster Alix Earle leaned over her boyfriend Braxton Berrios to chat with Dixie D’Amelio, who declared that her favorite part of New Orleans was its “witchiness.”

But above all, Super Bowl weekend brings out NFL players licking their wounds from a long regular season and ready to party. Joe Burrow took his seat near a trio of larger-than-life maché champagne coupes covered in pomping flowers, as if a bubbly Mardi Gras float had landed in the apse of the cathedral. “Bode Rec. is about the history of American athletic wear, and for the show I was thinking about parade culture and the tradition of homecoming parades,” Emily Adams Bode Aujla told me before the show.