“Since there’s so much talk of sports and fashion integrating, why not really fully integrate?” Rhuigi Villaseñor is in a strong position to explore that possibility because he has a foot in each camp. We were speaking at a Paris showroom appointment for Rhude, the brand he founded in 2015, and which rode the luxury streetwear wave to win him a spell as creative director of Bally and a Zara collaboration. It also caught the eye of Como 1907, the Italian football club just qualified for the Champions League for the first time in its history, where Villaseñor was made chief brand officer in 2024.
As well as enabling him to post his specialist cigar-and-fine-wine selfies as he speeds in Rivas across the world’s most famous luxury lake, his Como role has immersed Villaseñor in the swirling currents of football apparel. What he has drawn from that immersion extends beyond one club. He says he has identified a structural opportunity in the way football clubs are serviced by sportswear giants. While the biggest and richest clubs—your Arsenals, Real Madrids and Bayern Munichs—understandably receive the attention, investment, and distribution power, those below the superclub tier often receive far less.
Villaseñor’s proposed answer is a new partnership model that treats clubs as cultural properties with their own latent fashion value. Through Rhu, the sports-facing extension of his world, and Rhude’s positioning in luxury, he has established a partnership with Lorenzo Boglione of BasicNet, one of Italy’s finest sportswear manufacturers and distributors, to shape a system in which clubs with strong identities but less global leverage can receive better margins, stronger visibility, and access to more elevated retail spaces. He says 17 great European football clubs, as well as Tottenham Hotspur, have already signed up.
The designer shared all this as we riffled through his rail for Rhude. “Kids are into archive,” he said, “and I’ve been around for so long now that I think I can kind of archive our own.” Rhude’s Marlboro-esque chevron signature was finely integrated across the collection, from the eye stays in suede slipper sneakers—a little Repetto—to the collar of a bronze MA-1, via the pocket flaps of a positively pimpy black leather field jacket. Finely composed rugby jerseys, waffle henleys, Como-coded camp-collar sailing-scene shirting, chinoiserie house shorts, raw linen track tops, and a linen jumpsuit in Neapolitan-style white-on-black chalk stripe were among the most enjoyable post-streetwear-streetwear pieces on show. Especially clever was a horizontally ribbed terry top in blue and red stripes that combined design motifs drawn from French jolie-madame bouclé tailoring with others upcycled from tech-bro mid-layer gorpcore.
Rhude seems in great health, yet while the brand remains the center of Villaseñor’s universe it is no longer his whole orbit. “As long as we remain curious,” he said, “I think it’s going to always work.”
