a heated rivalry star paid full price for a cree designer's cardigan. it sold $12,000 in an hour. this is the assignment.

Hudson Williams at TIFF 2026. Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via British Vogue, CBC News and The Globe and Mail

The most romantic thing a famous man did this week was pay for a sweater.

Hudson Williams, half of the gay hockey show that ate this year, wore a blue-and-black striped knit cardigan to the Kate Spade New York Global Summit on Women's Mental Health in New York on Sept. 30. That was Canada's National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and he wore an orange ribbon with it, per Vogue, CBC and the Globe. The cardigan is the Journey, by Justin Jacob Louis, a designer from Samson Cree Nation in Alberta who works out of a studio in Chilliwack, B.C., and who founded the Indigenous streetwear label Section 35 in 2016.

how it got to new york

Williams's team asked to buy it the weekend before. Shipping from the warehouse would have taken too long, so someone from his team drove from Vancouver to the studio on Sunday to pick it up, according to all three outlets. And he paid. "He didn't ask for it for free," Louis told the Globe. "He purchased it, which is so important for an independent designer."

Somewhere a stylist with a closet full of gifted Loewe just felt a draft.

what happened to sales

"I realized that, like, every cardigan had sold out," Louis told CBC. "At that time, there was like $12,000 in sales in a matter of an hour. And I was like, 'What the hell?'" He told CBC the shop did roughly two to three months of business in two days. The cardigan is $350 Canadian and is now on pre-order for delivery in December and January.

He was also honest about what that money means at his size. "People think we have a lot of money," he told Vogue, the outlet that first interviewed him. "We don't. We're always grinding."

The design, Louis said in all three interviews, came from a dream: blue moonlight over the prairie in winter, a tipi, and stars as ancestors. Which is a lot of meaning for a garment that most of the internet first encountered as "what is he wearing and where do I get it."

This is not Williams's first time turning a nice gesture into a real thing; it is the same fortnight the show's fictional charity became a real one. The lesson for every other famous person with a stylist is short and free to copy. Find the small designer. Pay them. Wear it on the day it means something. Let the fans do the rest.