Culture
Taylor Swift’s jacket brings star boost to Kristin Juszczyk, wife of 49ers’ All-Pro fullback
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The San Francisco 49ers had a bye during the opening round of the playoffs, but that didn’t mean Kyle Juszczyk had the weekend off.
The team’s fullback went into action after his wife, Kristin, managed to meld three massive newsmakers — Taylor Swift, the NFL and the winter storms that were walloping the nation — when Swift confidently strode into Kansas City’s frozen Arrowhead Stadium wearing a jacket Kristin had made.
Swift and her legion of followers wield tremendous influence and can make social media sites convulse. And her long, red puffer — adorned with the No. 87 of her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — did just that.
For the Juszczyks, it was the equivalent of a five-touchdown day. They’d learned the singer-songwriter planned to wear the jacket but they weren’t sure. Kyle said they were watching on television from their San Jose home on Saturday afternoon when cameras caught Swift, protected by the jacket and a white beanie, getting out of a golf cart before the Chiefs’ wild-card playoff game against the Miami Dolphins got underway.
.@taylorswift13 arrives for her #NFLPlayoffs debut. ❤️#MIAvsKC — 8pm ET on Peacock
Also available on #NFLPlus https://t.co/bTakd7uLvX pic.twitter.com/Ugb1URaSoc— NFL (@NFL) January 14, 2024
“Happiness, appreciation,” he said of their reaction. “Just so stoked for (Kristin) because I know how hard she worked, how hard she grinded. To see Taylor wearing it — and it looked incredible — it was awesome. We were so happy in our house.”
After that, Kyle became part hype man, part PR representative, part internet watchdog. He fielded calls and texts from media members eager for the puffer scoop. And he scoured social media, making sure Kristin got credit for the instantly famous jacket. At one point, the NBC announcers quipped that Swift is so famous she could merely call up Nike and have them whip up a custom-made jacket.
“It was like, ‘Argh, come on!’ We’ve got to let these people know it was all Kristin,” said Kyle, who noted that the network later corrected the error.
Arriving in her jacket made by Kristin Juszczyk https://t.co/py60MZ6NS8
— Kyle Juszczyk (@JuiceCheck44) January 14, 2024
Since Swift’s stroll into the stadium, Kristin has gained more than 450,000 followers on Instagram. Kyle also described a tidal wave of media attention, so much that Kristin opted not to do any interviews this week. They’ve heard from every outlet from Vogue, which struck Kristin, to ESPN, which was important to Kyle.
“Adam Schefter doesn’t ring any huge bells with her,” he said. “I had to explain: This is a big deal in the football world. And that was one of the cooler things to come of this — it merged two different worlds. The football world was interested in it, the fashion world, the Swifties. They all came together and 99.9 percent of it was really positive. So I was really happy to see that.”
The wind chill temperature was minus-27 degrees in Kansas City on Saturday, and yet Swift managed to radiate when she arrived at the stadium, thanks in part to her bespoke puffer.
It’s why Kristin began designing game-day attire. When she and Kyle first started dating 10 years ago, she realized that supporting your football-player boyfriend meant dressing like everyone else in the stadium. The standard fan uniform was, well, uniform. So she began cutting up Kyle’s No. 44 jerseys and fashioning them into something more stylish — a corset top or miniskirt for an early September game, a puffer coat for the playoffs. The theme: red zone meets the red carpet.
Kristin Juszczyk joined her husband, 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk, at the Pro Bowl in Las Vegas last year. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)
Her designs got a boost in November when she sent a pair of white, Patrick Mahomes-themed pants to Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the Chiefs quarterback. That’s who passed along the coat that Swift wore on Sunday.
In December, gymnast Simone Biles wore a green vest that Kristin refashioned from the jersey of Biles’ husband, Green Bay Packers safety Jonathan Owens. No word on whether the vest will reappear at Levi’s Stadium on Saturday when Owens and the Packers take on the 49ers.
Kristin also approached 49ers receiver Deebo Samuel, one of Kyle’s more fashion-forward teammates, about wearing one of her designs. According to Samuel, her initial idea was to make Samuel a jacket with his own number on it, which he declined.
“I said, ‘If you make me a (Brock) Purdy one, I’ll wear that,’” he said.
So she did, fashioning a vest that not only included Purdy’s No. 13 but also had “MVP” emblazoned in several spots. Samuel said he got the vest earlier in the season but he chose to wear it the week after Purdy’s four-interception outing against the Baltimore Ravens, a show of confidence in his quarterback.
Dressed in his Sunday vest 🔥@19problemz x #SFvsWAS pic.twitter.com/lfWSuYX3aV
— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) December 31, 2023
The past weekend, meanwhile, turned out to be a double-Taylor-whammy for Kristin. While she was in the process of making puffers for Swift and Brittany Mahomes, actor and Michigan native Taylor Lautner reached out and asked for a Detroit Lions-themed jacket he could wear at Detroit’s playoff opener.
Her creations usually are accompanied by a short video she posts to her Instagram or TikTok accounts. They feature a few snips of her shears, some stitching and — voila! — the garment is complete. The clips last a few seconds and often end with the celebrity rocking the outfit. The one about Lautner’s jacket ends with him excitedly opening the package like a kid tearing into a Nintendo box on Christmas morning.
The breezy videos don’t capture the toil involved. Kyle said he’ll awaken at 3 or 4 a.m. some mornings to find that his wife isn’t in bed but is downstairs working on one of her projects. Getting Lautner his jacket, which incorporates the jersey of Lions pass rusher Aidan Hutchinson, also was an adventure.
Kristin overnighted the jacket via FedEx, but the package got delayed in Memphis, Tenn., due to the same storms that had blasted Kansas City. Kyle said Kristin managed to get a hold of someone high in the chain at FedEx, who told them “it was their mission to get that package to (Lautner).”
(In another merging of worlds, FedEx founder and chairman Fred Smith is the father of former Atlanta Falcons head coach Arthur Smith, and FedEx’s president and CEO is Arthur’s older brother, Richard. Kyle confirmed they spoke with a member of the Smith family.)
“They sent a truck to go pick it up in Memphis,” Kyle continued. “The truck broke down. They sent another truck. And then they literally delivered to (Lautner) on the sideline.”
All of which begs the question: Who will be the next celebrity to rock one of Kristin’s jersey designs? Kyle wouldn’t say if there were any other surprises in store during the playoffs, although his backfield mate, Christian McCaffrey, revealed that a design for his fiancee, Olivia Culpo, is in the works. That would be another terrific boost — Culpo, after all, is a model and former Miss Universe winner with 5.3 million Instagram followers.
Still, it’ll be hard to top Swift, who has 279 million Instagram followers and the sway of a queen.
“It’s crazy,” Kyle said. “Crazy how powerful one person is.”
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(Top photo of Taylor Swift: Ed Zurga / Associated Press)
new video loaded: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
transcript
transcript
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
David Szalay became the first British Hungarian to win the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh.”
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“I think fiction can take risks. I think it’s one of the things that it can do. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do to the same extent.” “I think all six of the books in the short list really, you know, not — it’s not saying this is the headline theme, but there is that theme of reaching out, wanting a connection.”
By Shawn Paik
November 11, 2025
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
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