The new HBO series Winning Time is a show about how the 1980s Lakers became an unstoppable dynasty through a confluence of big personalities and even bigger talent, helping to save the NBA in the process. It is also a show about shirts.
Specifically: Jerry Buss’s beautiful, outrageous, and extremely unbuttoned shirts.
Dr. Buss, played impeccably by John C. Reilly, was a charismatic chemist who made a fortune in the real estate business and then used that fortune to purchase the Lakers in 1979. He liked to have a good time, and he wanted everyone else to have a good time too—so he turned basketball games into pure entertainment, introducing the Laker Girls dancers and giving celebrities courtside seats.
On Winning Time, this joie de vivre is communicated through a cavalcade of increasingly flamboyant button downs. When we first meet Buss, he’s not wearing a shirt at all, but is waking up bare-chested in the Playboy mansion to walk the viewer through an analogy about sex and basketball. Then he throws one on, en route to buy the Lakers and change history—but not before giving his chest hair a brush for the road.
More than anything, his fashion sense distinguished him from the world he had entered into as an outsider. “He’s worth like $80 million and he’s wearing jeans with frayed hems,” is how one character puts it early on. By episode two, which aired Sunday night, the show establishes the full scope of it.
For instance, here he is crashing a meeting where the perpetually uptight Jerry West (Jason Clarke) and other team executives are slogging through their budgetary limitations. They’re dressed in the muted blues and beiges of office drudgery, fastened all the way up. Buss then strolls in with an attractive young woman on his arm and a burgundy number undone practically to his waist:
And here he is in a more casual look, while visiting his beloved mother and accountant Jessie Buss (Sally Field):
In this scene, he gets together with The Celtics’ general manager and future rival Red Auerbach (Michael Chiklis). The two could not look any more like opposites, with old school and establishment Auerbach chomping a cigar and being practically choked by his tie, whereas Buss is all easy, flowing gold silk (paired with a blazer, for professionalism):
Every time Buss appears onscreen, in a magnificently sleazy seventies shirt, it is as surprising and delightful as anything he tried to accomplish on the court. So I called up costume designer Emma Potter to learn more about how they came together.
Potter told me she sourced TV Buss’s shirts from famed Beverly Hills shirtmaker Anto, with about 90% of the designs being custom-made—and that they actually made bespoke shirts for real-life Buss back in the day. The remainder were vintage. Her favorite look is that gold silk one, which they referred to as the “liquid gold” shirt on set. “I think it was one of the earliest ones where I was like, ‘oh, we can really have some fun here,’” she said.
So did Buss really let it all hang out like that? “I had found a couple of earlier photographs of him in some early press photography and he had like four buttons undone,” Potter said. “John [C. Reilly] and I talked a lot about the idea that he really kind of portrayed this very body positive image of himself and seemed very comfortable in his physical self.”
Buss in 1980.
Randy Tasmussen/AP/Shutterstock“To feel confident in these stuffy boardroom settings or with all these surly old scouts and coaches, he is wearing fluid silk shirts in bold colors and his chest is exposed,” she continued. That said, there were some times when they had to tone it down to suit the script. “As the season goes on, there’s definitely moments where we were like, ‘oh, well this is a serious scene, so perhaps just three buttons today and not the four,’” Potter added.
Jeff Pearlman, the author of Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, confirmed that Buss dressed like this. “When I think of an animal when I see Jerry Buss, peacock always enters my head. Just the way that chest hair is always exploding out of the top of his unbuttoned buttons. He’s just so magical,” he told me.
I wanted to know if, over the course of his reporting, Pearlman had gotten a sense of how Buss thought of his fashion. Lakers coach Pat Riley obviously would go on to be known for strutting around in Armani, but did the team’s owner have any distinct philosophy? “The funny thing is, I don’t think he thought about it. He was a jeans and open-button shirt guy,” he told me. So dressing like that even when he was worth all that money wasn’t a power movie?
“I think it was just who he was. He wasn’t a corporate guy,” Pearlman said. “He always viewed himself as a guy from Wyoming. I don’t think it was a power move, I think it was an authentic way of dressing. I don’t think he gave a shit about what people thought.”
May your thoughts be as unbothered—and your shirts, as unbuttoned.