![]() “Just to go to that idea was revolutionary,” said Chris Tripucka, the NBA’s director of quality control for licensed products and outfitting. The colors and the combinations were eye-popping and like nothing that had been done before. The 1996 jerseys had metallic silver stars as a tribute to the Spurs and a fiesta trim running down the shirt and shorts. 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 logos were meant to look city-specific, to have a provincialism to a national sport’s marquee weekend. He designed the logo first, then peeled it apart for the uniforms. O’Grady wanted to get away from that for 1995. The jerseys, however, were still basic: home whites and road blues, with a large star at their center. In 1993, in Utah, the NBA used the Jazz as the base colors for the game’s color scheme. 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. The game was a once-a-year event, and if the jerseys didn’t work, any failure would disappear by the morning after. The All-Star Game became a perfect place to experiment and test the boundaries of how jerseys could look. The creative process was hardly creative O’Grady eventually built a whole team. 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. O’Grady came from FCB, an advertising agency, and he would be the mastermind behind the league’s uniforms for the next 13 years. That began to change in the early 1990s when the NBA hired Thomas O’Grady as its first creative director. 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. Those jerseys were a gateway to a new generation of possibilities. 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. So you know that’s a big part of why that jersey is so important.” 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. “A lot of people refer to that as the golden era of basketball. “You just think about the players that played in those games,” he said. Jesse Alvarez, Nike’s product director of men’s basketball, called them an “iconic” design. ![]() This season’s Nike City Edition Spurs uniform is an homage to those fiesta All-Star Game jerseys. It pops like a dance party at Lumon Industries. 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. “When I held it up, I thought it was a Phoenix Suns uniform. “I thought it was a nice uniform,” future Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen told the Chicago Tribune back in ’95. 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. The 19 jerseys - colorful, brash and idiosyncratic - are fan favorites. ![]() Not only for their aesthetic but also as avatars of that era. 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. More than a quarter of a century later, Barros has no shortage of love for that jersey. The purple colors and the orange color scheme … I just thought it was dope to look at.” The cactus represented where you were at. It wasn’t the same old just East-West color combo. “I thought it was something different and something unique.
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