Ranking What Was Really The Best Wrestling Attire Every Year 1990-2021
Bret Hart, CM Punk and Kenny Omega told better stories through fabric than most did with a mic.
Attire isn't everything, but it's a lot of it.
Wrestling is a cosmetic business. It is an entertainment medium considered so lowbrow and lamentable that it is often conflated with a kink amongst the general public, who deem you a gullible f*ckwit living in childlike fantasy land just for watching it. This is an industry that, in order to explode in mainstream popularity in the early 1990s, required a brand new artificially muscled prototype of the human form.
Imagine Stone Cold Steve Austin wearing luminous green tights on the way to confront Mr. McMahon in 1998. Is it really too reductive to claim that a second boom period wouldn't have happened if he did?
Austin got over as a badass because he wore black, where the stars of the Golden Era got over - in part - for splashing your screens in colour to re-contextualise professional wrestling in a vibrant hue of cartoon glamour.
To get over, it is absolutely imperative that, at the very least, you do not look like a dipsh*t. People are harsh. People are very, very harsh. Win a World Title looking like sh*t, as Shawn Michaels almost literally did at Survivor Series 2002, and they will only remember that they looked like sh*t.
In a cosmetic industry, who looked the very best...?
32. 1990 - Jushin Liger
Yes, that picture is from NXT in 2015. No, NJPW haven't yet made the connection between its lack of buzz and media clampdown.
NJPW had tried to experiment with crossovers before, to uneven effect: Tiger Mask was as legendary as Space Lone Wolf was risible. Jushin Liger, based on anime, sat uneasily between the two initially. Almost too elaborate in design, the attire might have tumbled into parody, had the performer behind the mask not performed like a hero with what appeared to be actual super-powers.
Liger's incredible, brain-melting arsenal has been cannibalised to such an extent that it will never feel like it once did, but with his shooting star press, he redefined the way in which wrestlers moved, much less worked.