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It is, these days, a tale as old as time: Earlier this month, Adam Sandler pulled up to a New York park to hoop in an outfit that instantly made its way to moodboards across the internet. The comedy legend paired an oversized horizontal-striped polo shirt with vertical-striped Adidas shorts (flex) and a pair of basketball kicks–Under Armour Curry 11s, because the Sandman is here for performance-oriented sneakers, not hypebeast eye candy. He came. He hooped. He dripped. He conquered. Or maybe he lost–there’s no scoreboard in the photo.
Still, he pulled off an Adam Sandler Outfit as only the OG can: effortlessly, and with an uncalculated apathy that may be impossible to replicate even as Sandlercore takes off across fashion. That’s not a joke, mind you: after years of being clowned on as one of the worst-dressed celebrities, Sandler has emerged as a singular style icon. Gen Z eats his big-shirt-big-shorts-mismatched patterns vibe up with zero irony–or maybe so much irony it just circles back around to a kind of warped sincerity (at a certain point it’s hard to tell).
Traces of his unpretentious take on Happy Madisonized dadcore are present across all of menswear these days. Hell, it’s your good friends here at GQ who’ve been on a vocal jorts kick lately. We’d be lying if we said Sandler (and John Cena) aren’t in some way responsible for the reclamation of a once-taboo wardrobe piece like those.
But even as we flock to our local Goodwills in search of 2XL sweat-wicking polos and scouring eBay for the perfect pair of drapey old And1 basketball shorts to pair them with, it’s high time we offer some deference to the king. See, the thing about true Sandlercore—the sort that only the man himself is capable of pulling off—is that while we’re all making an effort to dress like Adam Sandler, he simply is dressing like Adam Sandler. Even as his sense of style has become beloved across the internet, there’s still a blissful lack of care or attention on Sandler’s part to playing up the joke.
As soon as one begins putting thought into dressing like Adam Sandler, one inherently loses the thread a bit. Sandler still seems to put zero thought into his fits, tossing on whatever’s at the top of the clean clothes basket before walking out the door. By his own admission, sometimes he doesn’t even plan on pulling up to hoop–sometimes he just stumbles across a park with a live game, ducks into a Modell’s across the street to grab whatever pair of basketball shoes are in his size, and calls next. His beat-up boxy tees aren’t calculatedly distressed–they’ve just been through 200 spin cycles over the last decade.
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