When Mitchell S. Jackson was offered the opportunity to put together a book about the intersection of fashion and basketball – subjects he has long harboured a fascination for – he thought the assignment would be “a no-brainer”.

“I thought it was going to be a short project,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and acclaimed author. “It was meant to be 15,000 words. How long could that take? A few months?”

Instead, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, ended up taking a few years to complete, involving a substantial amount of research into subjects that went far past how NBA stars look on and off the court.

“As a basketball fan, I had some idea who the stars of the NBA were, going back to its inception,” says Jackson, who serves as the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the English department of Arizona State University. “But there is a difference between an NBA star and the NBA star that is also fashionable. And this book is a great representation of where