Five years into his retirement, the 42-year-old NBA All-Star is focused on his legacy. He tells all in this FRONTPAGE story.
On May 13, 2013, Dwyane Wade added yet another clip to his already stellar career highlight reel. Only in this one, he wasn’t wearing his standard NBA uniform but a Gucci suit. In his 10th season, and his ninth straight as an All-Star, Wade was photographed entering the arena for a playoff game between his Miami Heat and the Chicago Bulls. His pregame suit was double-breasted, covered in polka dots, and his pants ended, well, rather abruptly, just below mid-shin. When the photo of his abridged trousers circulated on the Internet, NBA Twitter caught a small virus. “Dwyane Wade’s Outrageous Capri Pants Make You Do a Double-Take,” wrote Bleacher Report.
“I rocked that with confidence, even though I can look back and be like, ‘Oh man, those were high-waters,’” remembers Wade, a decade later, his smile practically audible over the phone. “At first, I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I should do this,’ and then I was like, ‘But if I’m gonna do it, I got to do it with confidence.’ And so I walked in there with swag.”
Wade is 42 years old now and many moons removed from stepping onto an NBA court or electrifying the Internet with a pre- or post-game look — and yet it’s that type of swag that, even five years into his retirement, keeps us from being able to take our eyes off of him. (“People ask me: ‘Man, what are you doing now?’” says Wade. “I say, ‘I’m living life!’”) He’s become a Met Gala red carpet staple, appearing alongside his wife, Gabrielle Union-Wade, in 2015, 2022, and 2023. He has regularly popped up on TV, as the host of the game show The Cube and as an analyst on NBA on TNT. He’s become an outspoken advocate for trans rights (his daughter Zaya, a fashion model, is transgender) and against gun violence. His portfolio of business ventures — clothing, wine, entertainment — is quickly becoming as long as his catalog of basketball accolades. But there are a lot of retired athletes who work hard and still slide into irrelevance. The fact that Wade has made it look so easy to stay front and center in the cultural consciousness is because of a particularly photogenic brand of charisma. “How I like to look at it: I’m 42 years old, and somebody still wants to take pictures of me,” he jokes. “So I’m going to enjoy putting on some beautiful clothes.”
It was Wade’s game, not his clothes, that first demanded attention, of course. In 2003, he entered the NBA four picks behind LeBron James, whom everyone was already crowning as the sport’s next GOAT. But in 2006, it was a 24-year-old Wade who put on one of the greatest performances in NBA Finals history, leading his Miami Heat to their first-ever championship, earning the NBA Finals MVP and, from his teammate Shaquille O'Neal, the nickname “Flash.” Wade says that Finals experience taught him how obsessed he was with his dreams — and how willing he was to push through what was hard to get what he wanted. “I wouldn’t allow anyone to tell me what I could not accomplish,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m really about this. I’m really obsessed with what I want to do and who I want to be, because I’m actually becoming it.’”
As Wade was becoming one of the league’s flashiest superstars on the court, he was also becoming one of its most fashion-forward faces off of it. Before Wade’s 2005–06 championship season, the NBA instituted a dress code that stipulated players wear “business casual attire” to games. Wade says a lot of the players got competitive about who could look the best under the new rules. Back then, he had neither time nor interest in going shopping, so he got a stylist. “As I got more comfortable, as I got older, as fashion started becoming more acceptable, as we started going to more fashion shows, my fashion sense was able to elevate,” he says. If today the NBA is by far the most stylish men’s sports league, with stadium tunnels acting as pseudo runways, it’s because of players like Wade who weren’t afraid to use the new dress code as an excuse to take (or, in the case of those Gucci pants, have his tailor take) some risks. “If you go back, you’ll see certain moments of press conferences where I’ve had pink pants on, when everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, he wore pink pants,’” says Wade. “Now people wear pink pants to golf. It’s nothing. But at the time, it was a big deal, right?”
Wade’s appreciation for style started in Chicago, and his first lessons came from his dad. “He was just a fly dude, and it didn’t matter if it was a sweatsuit or if it was a suit,” says Wade. His dad instilled in him the type of love for and attention to detail that means that, if you’re ever sharing a room with Wade, he’s likely looking at your socks. “I’m all about scanning details of people, because it shows you a lot about how people care about themselves,” he says. It was also during his childhood that he saw a model for a type of masculinity that involved self-care: “My father has always been a man who would take care of himself. My uncles took care of themselves. I always knew that’s what I wanted to do: I wanted to be one of them sharp-dressed men who smelled good, who stayed clean-shaved, and all that.” So Wade has always done the same: massages, facials, nail appointments. “I’ve been getting my nails painted since 2007,” he says.
If there’s an uncommon magnetism to Wade, perhaps it’s because we see in him a comfort in his own (well-moisturized) skin that we long to have in our own. If style is self-expression, then Wade’s style — just like his game — has always felt confident because it’s rooted in an authentic sense of self. “Me and my body, we love putting on clothes,” says Wade. “It’s not something I play around with. It’s a part of my personality, it’s a part of my lifestyle. So I’m not just wearing clothes. I put that shit on.”
Throughout his career, Wade’s style elevated alongside his game. “You don’t want your outfit to be louder than your game,” he says. He captured two more championships with Miami, in 2012 and 2013, after teaming up with James and Chris Bosh, creating the league’s first “super team” and forever changing the landscape of how NBA teams are constructed. Last August, he was officially enshrined in the Hall of Fame, closing one chapter of his life — one he’d been writing since he was a kid — and opening another. “I will find nothing else to chase like that,” he says, of his hoop dreams. “But when it comes to things I can control, like my chase to be a certain kind of father — that’s there. I want to show up for my family in ways that I’ve always dreamed of, too.”
After spending years as the leader of his team, Wade is now focused on being the leader of his home and his businesses. If he’s learned any lessons on that front, they’re twofold: First, if you want your kids to think you’re cool, make sure their friends think you’re cool. “I don’t care if [my kids] think I’m cool; like, I’m their dad,” he says. “But if their friends think I’m cool? Now I’ve leveled up. When their friends think you’re cool, then you’re cool to them automatically.”
Secondly, expect imperfection and mistakes, and counter them with unconditional love, the type of Christian “agape” love that Wade says he learned from his mother. “I allow space for the imperfection of things, and confidence in imperfection, knowing that they're not going to stay there if given the right support,” he says. “That’s my teammate, who just missed three threes in a row, and I need him to know if the game winner’s coming, and they're going to double me, you better be ready to shoot this next one and you’re going to make it. That was in high school. The same thing plays even now in business. You have to continue to leave that gap — that’s why it’s called a-gap-e love — you gotta leave that gap, that space, for unconditional love in the midst of no one being perfect.”
For now, Wade is turning that unconditional love not just on others, but on himself, taking care of the man that underlies all of his self-expression; doing “inner” work that includes meditation, journaling, hot yoga, and even creating vision boards for where he hopes his life will go next. “I’m happy with my five years [since retiring], but now that these five years are coming to an end, I’m already like, ‘Okay, what’s the next five going to look like?’” he says, noting that it’s not just about having one good year, but many good ones, strung together into a good, even legendary, life.
“It’s about stacking seasons,” he says. “That’s how you get to a Hall of Fame career.”
