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: Poetry Month Reading Recommendations
By Greg Cowles, Edward Vega and Laura Salaberry
April 25, 2026
Gothic Fantasy
Weavingshaw
by Heba Al-Wasity
Al-Wasity’s haunting and romantic novel follows Leena Al-Sayer, a young refugee woman who can see ghosts, and St. Silas, a mysterious and supernatural Mafioso, as they embark on a quest that takes them through the urban underworld and eventually to the crumbling Weavingshaw estate, grappling with evils both supernatural (demons, possession) and horrifyingly real (displacement, the prison-industrial complex) along the way. Read our review.
MAKE BELIEVE: On Telling Stories to Children, by Mac Barnett
Mac Barnett is an irrepressible creator of zany books for younger readers. Breezy, frisky romps, dozens of them. (My favorite is Mac B., Kid Spy, Book 1: “Mac Undercover,” which features the former queen of England and her corgis.) He’s an entertainer at heart. In his fiction he knows how to keep young audiences engaged, with droll characters and deft reversals of fortune.
So what are we to make of “Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children,” the first book for adults by Barnett, our current national ambassador for young people’s literature? This tidy volume of scarcely a hundred pages serves as a succinct defense of his career choice, which he takes as a ministry. (He notes some of the more common disses that well-meaning citizens fling at children’s writers. I particularly cherish something said to me at a fund-raiser when I was being ushered to the microphone: “I would love to write a children’s book, if only I could clear the weekend!”)
I trust it’s fair to start with the single tonal misstep in the volume, which occurs early, on Page 6. With fanfare and too much white space: “A children’s book is a book written for children.” Carry on.
The rest of the book, presented in three chapters, is compulsively readable and doesn’t require a higher degree to appreciate. It has the chatty tone of a slightly obsessive, over-caffeinated friend sitting in your passenger seat with 90 minutes until the next exit.
You can’t help admiring Barnett’s sympathy with the urgent struggle of the young to unlock the riddle of the world. Here he is describing his son’s first tantrum: It involved an intention to go out the front door and in again, over and over. The patient dad eventually lets his toddler straddle the doorsill, wailing, unable to decide in or out. “My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time,” he realizes. “My son wasn’t being a toddler; he was being a person.”
Barnett’s understanding of his child’s dilemma is crucial to his argument: To care about sharing books with children, we have to care about who they are as people. He makes one of his strongest points by calling out the fact that our culture generally holds children in low esteem. To which I might add that while we give lip service to our cherished young, their teachers are underpaid and overworked, their school and library budgets are slashed, and their food security is threatened. Children with big eyes are served up as an emblem of our caring society before the votes against supplying their basic needs carry the day. Don’t get me started.
“Make Believe” isn’t a history. You’ll find little reference to the many narrative forms that feed into the family tree of what we now call children’s books. No Hesiod, no Ovid, no Homer. No Aesop or La Fontaine. No chansons de geste or Chrétien de Troyes. None of John Newbery’s commodification of children’s stories into printed works, nor any mention of the penny dreadful or the funny pages. The great golden age of children’s literature (the mid-19th century to the end of the Edwardian era) — largely though not entirely British writing — does get its due. But Barnett’s laser focus is the reality of life, and books, for the younger child.
He is incisive in his selection of a few examples. I, for one, have never viewed Richard Scarry’s Busytown books as worth analyzing. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t encounter them in my own long-ago childhood? But I’m corrected, and I’m thankful for it. Meanwhile, Maurice Sendak and Margaret Wise Brown, two midcentury creators fostered by the great Harper & Row children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, are given proper pride of place. Barnett tells us what these three godheads brought to our modern understanding of the complexity, if inarticulacy, of the emotional lives of children.
In the book’s central section, Barnett trains his attention on Brown’s classic picture book “Goodnight Moon.” Like a sapper defusing a bomb, he examines those familiar pages in a revelatory and even clinical way. He elucidates the famous double-page spread accompanying the text “Goodnight nobody/Goodnight mush.” Anyone who has ever held a child on a lap at bedtime while reading Brown’s book aloud has encountered the Dadaist conundrum of a blank page to connote “Goodnight nobody” — certainly one of the most potentially frightening concepts for a young rabbit, um, kid, who in falling asleep will be more alone than it is possible to be while awake. That “Goodnight mush” is on the opposite page is a eucatastrophe: “We exist! We are alive! We eat food! What a relief!” It’s “Always look on the bright side of death” for the youngest minds. Barnett’s entire treatise is worth this epiphany — and there are a lot more I could trot out for you.
“Fiction is a kind of game, and reading is a way of playing.” This has the sound of a koan at a poetry workshop, and yet the grateful reader of “Make Believe” can make believe they understand it. And making believe is the first step toward making sense. Kudos to Barnett.
MAKE BELIEVE: On Telling Stories to Children | By Mac Barnett | Little, Brown | 112 pp. | $20
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