The man behind the many suits of Jon Cooper

The sartorial landscape of professional sports is a place of leisure in 2026.

Gone are the days of NBA coaches hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy in Windsor knots.

You’ll never see Andy Reid strutting the sidleline in a red and white herringbone topcoat—those days departed decades ago.

And in baseball? Managers simply need to look capable of stealing second base at any given moment.

At last, welcome to the NHL, one of the final frontiers of guys in good-looking suits coaching sports teams.

Even with the league’s relaxed dress code policies this season, the NHL remains the pinnacle of classic in-game fashion. And few people adhere to it better than Jon Cooper and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Jon Cooper is a man of many, many suits. Ahead of Tuesday night’s matchup against the Colorado Avalanche, he’ll celebrate his 1,000^th game in a pregame ceremony in which he’ll assuredly be wearing one. He’s worn playoff suits, road trip suits, big game suits and Stanley Cup-winning suits.

And the one person behind them all is David Kahn.

Kahn is the owner of Tampa’s Bespoke & Co. and Jon Cooper’s go-to stylist for more than 11 years. The Philadelphia native holds more than four decades of experience in the fashion industry, rising through prominent names like Nordstrom, Paul Stuart and Hugo Boss before opening up his own shop in 2007.

Today, Kahn dresses some of Tampa’s most successful executives, coaches and professional athletes. His client list is a not-so-subtle name drop of well-dressed individuals: Cooper, Victor Hedman, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Ronde Barber and Mike Evans can all call themselves customers of Kahn’s one-of-a-kind, custom shop on Bay to Bay, just to list a few.

Bespoke & Co. also holds rare fabrics and personal style secrets you won’t find anywhere else—like Cooper’s penchant for matching his pocket square to his opponent’s colors. (Some quick photographical research seems to back this theory up.)

Ahead of his friend and client's 1,000^th game, Kahn sat down in a very nice ensemble to give us the scoop on styling pro athletes, Coop’s suits, and how his South Tampa shop became a style haven to Tampa Bay's stars.

Thompson Brandes: How did Jon Cooper first come into the picture as a client?

David Kahn: So I can give you an exact date, I was looking it up when you walked in. November 4^th, 2014. He lived here a couple blocks away and just walked in one day. And I think he needed some alterations, but then wanted to see what we did. And we struck up a conversation, it took off from there.

He has a very specific taste and likes quality clothing, which is what we do. The majority of our clothing is handmade in Italy. We do all the design work here. So I sit down with each individual client and we go through fabrics and linings, threads, buttons, all of the details. And then I have a group of tailors in Italy that produce for us. It's old-world craftsmanship, which I'm enamored with. And it's something different that we do from our competition.

So if somebody were to walk in off the street—I guess in this case, Jon Cooper literally did that—what is your process?

Our basic process is really, like I said, the old-world process where we sit down, I get an idea, a sense of what the client's looking for and a sense of lifestyle. When someone walks in off the street, it's harder. When someone makes an appointment and I have an idea of who they are, I can look them up, look at what their history is. And oftentimes transform someone into something that they're not sure of. Jeff Blashill [former Lightning assistant, now head coach of the Chicago Blackhawks] reached out to me the other day via text, and had some things laid out and was asking me, "Hey, does this go with this? Which is the best outfit, best combination?"

Oh, that's cool.

And I do that all the time. And even for Jon, when we first met and he started to get some clothing, we laid everything out and he took pictures of them. When they're on the road for two weeks, they don't want to take a steamer trunk filled with clothing. They want to take a couple of things and be able to mix and match and make it look more chameleon-esque. So we did that and I do that for a lot of my clients as well.

Hockey is sort of the last major North American sport in which coaches wear suits on the bench. I don't know if you've noticed this.

I do know that.

I think the NBA stopped during COVID. Everybody just wears jumpsuits now.

COVID was really what did it. And now the NHL has said that they don't have to wear suits to the game, but I think it's up to the organization. I know Julien [BriseBois] still dresses pretty snappy and I've made some things for him. And then Jon and his style and his guys all dress well. So it's nice to see that. And it's nice to see that even though the NHL has said, "You don't really have to anymore," that most of the guys are doing it. Marty [St. Louis] was wearing a pretty snazzy jacket the other night when they played the Canadiens.

82 games a year, and now Cooper’s 1,000th game with the Bolts. How many suits is that?

I don't know if I can put a number on it.

Over a hundred?

No, no, no. Nothing like that. In the two digits, but he has his favorites and actually, in all sports, there are superstitions. So there are winners and losers. And sometimes if a suit loses too many games, it might sit on the hanger in the closet.

Has Cooper’s style evolved at all as fashion and trends evolve over time?

I mean, we have a couple of suits that he's done with some patterns, but he's pretty clean and classic looking. I mean, he has really good taste. The fabrics that he chooses are really, really nice fabrics. When Victor [Hedman] got some suits the other day, they were reminiscent of fabrics that Jon would choose. My biggest challenge with him is having him button his button. But I understand when you've got iPads and Sharpies and crap in your pockets it's difficult.

I also don't know that I've changed. The only thing that I've really changed is his pant length, like some of the guys were wearing higher tapered pants, that look is no longer in.

Do you have a favorite suit of his?

So recently he got a suit that I own. He saw me wearing it and it's one of my favorites. And he wore that actually I think at the Montreal game the other night. That one in particular is a little more fashionable.

Deion Sanders famously had the mantra, "Look good, feel good, play good.” Do you think there’s anything to “Look good, feel good, coach good?”

100%. I had an attorney client that dubbed my clothing the confidence suit. And there is a level of confidence that you exude when you look good and you feel good and you command respect. And Jon has an air about him...respect…it's like the title right underneath his picture. And players I think rise to a different level when they are playing for a respected coach—and talk about a player's coach—but I think that's true in any sport.

How has working with Jon and the Lightning and the Bucs shaped your business over the years?

So we were talking about Ronde earlier. I met Ronde Barber when I first moved here. And he started working with me and getting clothing from me. And at first, he was protective when sharing what he found, but the word got out and I worked more and more with the Bucs. There was a year Dirk Koetter, when he was coach, bought 30 gift certificates for all of his coaches and administrators. So that opened some doors.

And every sport has its own individual identity. I’ve been dressing Mike Evans since his rookie year, and I've made some pretty snazzy looking things for him. Not too long ago we did a python print suit that was pretty cool looking. It got a lot of attention at an event that Chris Godwin was throwing and people were coming up to him asking him, "Where did you get that?" And he just kept pointing to me wherever I was, "Go see David."

That's great.

And I think Jon's done some of that for me, as well, with some of the players that are new to town. Jake Guentzel had a wardrobe mishap with the hurricanes right after he moved here. And so we reproduced several suits for him. So that was a good start to that relationship.

When you flip on your TV to watch a Lightning game, what's it feel like to see your work on the bench night-in and night-out?

I enjoy it. There's a lot of pride that I get from doing it. I'm older than most of the coaches and definitely all of the players. And so I am passionate about it. I believe, I support. We have season tickets to the Lightning. And with the coaches standing on the bench all in suits and most of them mine, it says a lot and it makes me proud. People that know me, that know what I do, always point things out. I get texts, "Hey, is so-and-so wearing your suit tonight?" And that's always pretty cool.