Rope instead of a belt: Bad Bunny confused the entire fashion world at the Super Bowl

While the entire Internet was sorting out jersey numbers and scenery symbols, the loudest detail of Bad Bunny's look at the Super Bowl LX headlining performance was the usual rope on the belt — and it spoke about men's fashion more than the rest of the suit.

A belt that is not a belt

At first glance, a trifle not worth attention intrigues xrust. The Puerto Rican artist took the stage in a cream ensemble from Zara: a shirt and tie, wide-leg navy trousers, and a cropped football jersey-style sweatshirt with the words “Ocasio”—the musician’s real name—and the number 64 on the back. Fans immediately began to build theories: why exactly 64, is it not the year the artist’s mother was born?

But fashion observers are hooked not on the numbers, but on the belt. Instead of the usual leather belt with a buckle, Bad Bunny wore a regular rope. As it turned out, this is not a random element of the image: he already used a similar technique after the release of the DTMF album — as a reference to the culture of the jíbaros, Puerto Rican small farmers who have become a symbol of self-sufficiency and national pride of the island. The rope instead of a belt here works not as an accessory, but as a statement: work clothes, not a showcase of luxury.

Zara against couture

The contrast is enhanced by what happened just a week earlier. At the Grammys, the artist wore a suit from Schiaparelli — a house that, especially for this purpose, released its first men's collection in 99 years of history. And for the main stage of American sports, Bad Bunny chose not a luxury brand, but a Spanish mass market.

The move turned out to be calculated. According to Bloomberg industry expert Andrea Felsted, interest in the image should bring new customers to Zara stores — and the timing is well chosen: since the beginning of 2025, parent Inditex has closed 132 points, 60 of them under the Zara banner, optimizing the network. Taking the stage at the Super Bowl with an audience of tens of millions of viewers is exactly the kind of free promotion for which fashion houses usually pay six-figure salaries to stars.

T-shirt for 30,000 euros

The market reaction was not long in coming. Employees at Inditex headquarters in Spain were given copies of the artist's jersey along with a thank-you note — and some of these T-shirts almost immediately ended up on Vinted and eBay with price tags reaching up to 30 thousand euros. For a mass-market item, this is an absurd amount, but it is what best shows: what is sold in fashion now is not a brand, but a story and a face.

What does this really mean

Stylists' raves aside, the rope story is part of a broader shift in men's fashion in recent seasons: status items with a logo are gradually giving way to details with a personal meaning. A fifteen-hundred-dollar belt no longer guarantees attention—and a string tied the way Puerto Rican farmers tie it at home suddenly becomes the main topic of discussion the day after the event with an audience of a billion.

For the Russian viewer, who watches the Super Bowl rather tangentially, the story is interesting primarily for this mechanism: it is not the budget of the image that determines the resonance, but whether there is a recognizable personal code behind the thing. The same can be seen in the local market — collaborations with mass markets like Zara or H&M from popular artists regularly sell out faster than luxury capsules precisely because the buyer pays not for the quality of the fabric, but for involvement in history.

Sources: bloomberg.com, cnn.com, thestreet.com

Xrust Rope instead of a belt: Bad Bunny Confused the entire fashion world at the Super Bowl