You may not have heard of Year of Ours, but you have seen their athleticwear. That is, if you were among the 127.7 million people watching this year’s Super Bowl LIX. The Los Angeles-based activewear brand outfitted SZA’s dancers during the halftime show in navy lace-up sports bras and lace-up ribbed leggings — playing off not only a football but also the laced-up red pants by Ashton Michael that SZA wore. The moment was a full circle one for Alejandra Hernandez-LaPilusa, SZA’s stylist and the designer behind Year of Ours, and it was also nine years in the making.
“Kendrick Lamar had 120 dancers. SZA only had six,” Hernandez-LaPilusa, who joined the athletic brand in 2016, the same year she started working with SZA, said to WWD in an interview. “And I was like, ‘Let’s, let’s put Year of Ours on these girls.’ Any time I can put our product on I will.”
(L-R) Kendrick Lamar and SZA perform onstage during Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show at Caesars Superdome on Feb. 9, 2025 in New Orleans.
Getty Images
For the past near decade, Hernandez-LaPilusa has been helping shape the visual identities of SZA and Year of Ours with the same ‘90s-rooted aesthetic and references. “I have a very specific, identifiable aesthetic where I am very vintage-inspired, and my knowledge in vintage clothing and my love of it is one of the reasons why Eleanor [Haycock] asked me to join the company in 2016,” Hernandez-LaPilusa said, explaining her path to the label cofounded by Haycock and Lily Shin. “The era we were kids and teenagers in — that supermodel era. That’s when I fell in love with fashion, as a kid, so I’m just forever pulling inspo from from that time.”
Year of Ours began with a quest to create “the perfect legging” that was both logoless and “90s-sportswear inspired.” “Our whole mood board at one point was…