Ellie the Elephant Has a Better Tunnel Walk Than Most Athletes. That Is Not an Accident.
Off-White. Coach. Telfar. Bedazzled Nike Air Force 1s. Custom jersey dresses from a Bronx designer. The New York Liberty’s mascot is not dressed like a mascot. She is dressed like a New York fashion moment that happens to also play basketball.
It is less than three hours before tip-off at Barclays Center and a group of influencers, media members, and Ellie’s content team are standing in the tunnel waiting. Not for Breanna Stewart. Not for Sabrina Ionescu. For Ellie the Elephant, the New York Liberty mascot, who rounds the corner in a sparkling seafoam green floor-length gown with bedazzled Nike Air Force 1s peeking out from underneath. A staff member notes that players arrived earlier. Nobody moved. They stayed for Ellie.
This is Ellie the Elephant in 2026. She is the official mascot of the WNBA’s New York Liberty, a role she has occupied since 2021, and she has turned that role into something the sports world does not have a clean category for. She is a mascot with an alter ego, Ellie J. Blige, a tribute to Mary J. Blige whose earrings she has worn courtside. She is a mascot with an Off-White skort set and a Telfar bag and MSCHF’s “Louis Vuitton Timberlands.” She is a mascot who was invited to New York Fashion Week. She is a mascot who people dress up as for Halloween, not because the costume is easy, but because the costume is aspirational.
She has almost half a million followers across Instagram and TikTok, more than some WNBA teams. She has been profiled by The New York Times, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and USA TODAY. When the Liberty’s chief brand officer gets calls from senior leaders across multiple sports leagues asking for the mascot blueprint, the answer starts with Ellie. The question is how an elephant from Brooklyn became one of the most genuinely stylish figures in American sports. The answer is that every look is deliberate, every accessory is intentional, and the tunnel at Barclays Center has become something nobody planned for it to be: a runway.
HOW THE LOOKS ACTUALLY GET MADE
Ellie the Elephant’s Style: The Fashion Operation Behind the Fits
Most sports mascots wear the same jersey every game for the duration of their careers. Ellie arrives in a curated pre-game outfit, changes into her game uniform, then changes again into a halftime performance look. That is three distinct looks per game, each one intentional, each one New York-specific, and each one designed around the particular challenge of dressing an elephant.
The game uniform situation was solved by Gabe Stark, a Bronx-native designer and founder of Rare Breed BX, who creates custom jersey dresses for Ellie that function like the team gear he normally makes for human women, but sized and structured for the specific challenge of an elephant silhouette. The result is something that reads as team-affiliated without looking like a standard mascot costume. “Miss Ellie is very snatched,” says Ellie’s creative director. “She’s fitting into a 2X or even an extra large. I think that just calls out to being confident in the shape that you’re in as an elephant, or a person, or any entity at that.”
@whowhatwear diva @Ellie the Elephant video: @Eliza Grace Huber #ellietheelephant #wnba #fenty ♬ original sound – JT 🦋
The pre-game tunnel looks are where the fashion operation gets more elaborate. New York-based designers style Ellie for those appearances, with accessories including Sunglass Hut eyewear, Coach bags, and Essie manicures. The challenge is not just aesthetic: the tunnel walk is a performance moment with specific physical demands. “When Miss Ellie is on the tunnel walk, it’s not just a walk, it’s a moment,” her creative director says. “So things not only need to look good, they need to work, they need to stay on.” They have learned that not every look that works on a human works on an elephant. The width of her legs matters. So does her tail.
The headline fashion moment of Ellie’s career came when she wore a full Off-White ensemble courtside, a black skort set with a royal blue handbag, at an event that put her in a room with artists and designers who do not typically share space with sports mascots. Tyla sat courtside at a Liberty game while Ellie circulated in coordinated fits. The line between the team’s fashion identity and its mascot’s fashion identity has effectively dissolved.
@voguemagazine @Ellie the Elephant turned up to sit front row at Off-White today along side June Ambrose, @Ciara ♬ original sound – Popsugar
“When Miss Ellie is on the tunnel walk, it’s not just a walk, it’s a moment. Things not only need to look good, they need to work, they need to stay on.” Ellie’s creative director, on the specific engineering of elephant fashion.
Style & Fits · Ellie the Elephant · Sideline Sports 2026
Ellie the Elephant and the Performance Looks: When the Halftime Show Has a Costume Department
The tunnel walk is the opening act. The halftime performance is the main event, and it has its own costume logic entirely. When Ellie performed a tribute to Whitney Houston for the Liberty’s 2026 home opener, the look was designed by fashion designer David Dalrymple and planned in collaboration with a full team of dancers and performers. The ideation ran from January to game day. Each detail of the Houston tribute look was tied to a specific era of Houston’s career. Previous tributes have followed the same formula: for Beyoncé, Ellie entered her Elliyoncé era with a full Beyoncé-inspired performance costume. For Mary J. Blige, she wore earrings from Blige’s own Sister Love collection with Simone I. Smith. The costume is never generic. It is always a character study.
@billboard In 1999, Whitney Houston sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the very first WNBA All-Star Game at Madison Square Garden, hosted by the New York Liberty. 🗽🏀 So for the Liberty’s 30th home opener and the WNBA’s 30th year, Ellie became “Ellie Houston,” channeling the music icon with a special performance honoring Whitney’s greatest hits. @nyliberty @WNBA #ellietheelephant #nyliberty #wnba #whitneyhouston #rnb ♬ original sound – billboard
“Ellie is a thespian,” her creative director says. “It is more than the dancing. It’s more than the music. Ellie tries to embody each artist and that takes studying of the mannerisms because the mannerisms are what bring it to life, not the staging or anything else.” The Michael Jackson tribute in May 2026, which included a moonwalk in the middle of the Barclays Center floor, went viral across TikTok within hours. The Jackson-inspired costume was built to hold up through synchronized movement, dramatic poses, and the specific physical demands of an elephant performing one of the most technically demanding moves in pop history.
The stamina required for all of this is significant. Ellie is visible to the audience for the entire game, including the tunnel walk, in-game court appearances, halftime performance, and post-game interactions. Her creative director jokes that she “wouldn’t survive three steps” in Ellie’s suit. The performer inside the suit has been the same anonymous person since 2021. The Liberty won’t say who it is. Breanna Stewart has said that players who sign with the team might find out, but not all new players are told. The identity is protected with the seriousness of a trade secret, which in the context of what Ellie has become, it effectively is.
——— WHAT THIS ACTUALLY IS ———
BEYOND THE MASCOT CATEGORY
Why Ellie the Elephant’s Style Matters Beyond the Fits
The fashion operation around Ellie is not separate from the business operation around the New York Liberty. When the team moved to Brooklyn in 2020, it had one corporate partner. By 2026 it has more than 50. The brands that have dressed and accessorized Ellie, Off-White, Coach, Sunglass Hut, Essie, Telfar, are not making charitable decisions about where to place their products. They are making calculated bets on a mascot who has demonstrated the ability to carry their brand to an audience that is young, fashion-conscious, and deeply engaged with the WNBA’s cultural moment.
The Liberty’s chief brand officer, Shana Stephenson, has described the Ellie phenomenon as something that required identifying what is unique to the team’s market and building a character around what would feel authentic to Brooklyn specifically. The elephant origin story carries Brooklyn DNA: the idea came in part from P.T. Barnum’s 1800s stunt of using elephants to demonstrate the strength of the Brooklyn Bridge. The name “Ellie” sounds like Ellis Island, next door to the Statue of Liberty. The team she represents plays at Barclays Center in the borough that considers itself the fashion and culture capital of the world. The fits are not incidental to any of that. They are an extension of it.
Fans who attend Liberty games now come dressed as Ellie. Not in Liberty jerseys. As Ellie specifically: elephant tails pinned to the back of shirts, braided hair with seafoam green extensions, floppy elephant ears. One fan made three sets of elephant ears adorned with foam Statue of Liberty crowns: one for herself, one for a friend, one for an 8-year-old. “She’s got fashion, she’s got style, she’s so Brooklyn,” that fan told ESPN. That sentence, applied to a mascot, is genuinely unprecedented in American professional sports.
“She’s got fashion, she’s got style, she’s so Brooklyn.” A Liberty fan, explaining why she made three sets of handmade elephant ears for herself, a friend, and an 8-year-old to wear to a WNBA game.
Style & Fits · Sideline Sports · Ellie the Elephant 2026
Bedazzled Air Force 1s. Off-White. Telfar. MSCHF. A moonwalk at Barclays Center. An alter ego named Ellie J. Blige. Custom jersey dresses from a Bronx designer built around the specific engineering challenge of dressing an elephant with curves.
The WNBA’s most valuable mascot is also its most stylish entity. That is not a coincidence. It is a decision that Brooklyn made on purpose, and the rest of the sports world is still trying to understand how to copy it.
Miss Ellie is very snatched.
