Threads of Triumph: Professional Wrestling's Most Iconic Looks

by McKenzie Mitchell, Mercedes Moné (Foreword)

248 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 7, 2026

Reviews

[The Noire Anthology · Rating 4 out of 5]

Threads of Triumph: Professional Wrestling’s Most Iconic Looks by McKenzie Mitchell is a richly curated visual and cultural history of professional wrestling told through the evolution of ring gear from the 1940s to the present. Rather than offering a chronological match history or a straightforward series of biographies, the book treats attire as primary text and wrestlers as collaborative storytellers who write their narratives with fabric, color, silhouette, and iconography. Drawing on Mitchell’s insider experience as a broadcaster for TNA and WWE and her work in custom jewelry design for wrestling stars, the project situates gear at the intersection of performance, fashion, and branding, showing how what wrestlers wear shapes the emotional grammar of a match and the long term construction of persona.

The volume foregrounds more than fifty wrestlers across eras and promotions, including “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, Ric Flair, Rey Mysterio, Becky Lynch, Bianca Belair, Luna Vachon, Chyna, and Bray Wyatt’s “The Fiend,” among others. Through full color photography and commentary, it examines how flamboyant robes, masks, jackets, and custom gear encode regional identities, racial and gender politics, and narrative arcs such as heel turns, comebacks, and retirement runs. The attention to figures like Vachon and Chyna underlines the gendered stakes of gear design, showing how women used spikes, war paint, unconventional silhouettes, and nontraditional color palettes to resist the sexualized norms of women’s presentation in wrestling and to carve out space for monstrosity, power, and androgyny. Similarly, the book highlights how Bianca Belair’s braid and self-made gear, or Rey Mysterio’s mask variations, operate as living archives of heritage, fandom, and intergenerational homage.

Visually, Threads of Triumph functions as a coffee table art book, but thematically it engages questions central to performance studies, visual culture, and sports entertainment. It treats ring gear as affective technology that produces crowd response and as a kind of wearable mythology that can be iterated and remixed over time. The Undertaker’s shifting coats, hats, and symbols, and Bray Wyatt’s horror inflected looks, are analyzed as extensions of horror cinema and Gothic tropes that shape how audiences experience fear, tension, and catharsis in the ring. At the same time, the book underscores the collaborative nature of gear production, acknowledging designers, jewelers, and independent makers who help translate character concepts into textiles and metal, and connecting this craft to broader histories of costume design and Black and Brown creative labor in sports entertainment.

For a lifelong wrestling fan (me), the text reads as both nostalgia and theory in practice. Major themes include the politics of representation, the role of fashion in constructing kayfabe, the evolution of women’s roles in wrestling, and the ways global wrestling cultures borrow from and influence one another through visual style. The book’s scholarly value lies less in formal academic apparatus and more in its archival scope and the way it invites readers to reexamine familiar icons through the semiotics of boots, trunks, robes, masks, and accessories. It offers a compelling argument that wrestling’s most enduring stories are inseparable from the gear that gave those stories shape, color, and texture.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, the only reason to pick up this book is to flip through the iconic looks of your favorite wrestlers. Some information was really thorough and other parts were very, very shallow. If you’re interested in the story behind these iconic images, this book is just not that thorough. And some wrestlers were completely left out. Ultimately, I think the book could have been formatted differently and either include more photos and details to justify flipping through the pages or cutting down what you kept.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Threads of Triumph is such a fun read. I loved how it blends wrestling history with little bits of trivia on every page. It feels like flipping through a timeline made by someone who genuinely loves wrestling. The stories are easy to follow, the pacing moves fast, and the behind the scenes nuggets kept me hooked the whole way. If you’re into wrestling, fashion, or just love a good mix of facts and personality, this one’s a win.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC