Eight minutes after the surging Philadelphia Flyers clinched a late-season playoff berth with a shootout win over the Carolina Hurricanes in mid-April, standout defenseman Travis Sanheim was on his phone, texting a top-of-mind message to his wife, Alex.We’re in! Let’s go! Buy the jackets lolEvery game during the Stanley Cup playoffs, wives and girlfriends of NHL players on the home team suit up in their own version of uniforms. Emblazoned with logos, jersey numbers and other custom-designed flair, these jackets have become flashy, fashionable staples of postseason hockey. This year, versions were worn by partners on all 16 teams in the field, with some commissioning extra clothing items such as windbreakers and jeans. Materials ranged from suede to wool to leather, but all held the goal of showing shared support — and standing out.The 2017 Washington Capitals were among the first teams, if not the first, with partners sporting jackets for the annual postseason tournament. That year, under the leadership of Lauren Oshie, whose husband, T.J., then played winger for the team, they wore matching denim affixed with patches of their respective partners’ numbers and names. Nearly a decade later, the trend is booming in just about every way: from exposure to extravagance to price. In a sense, it has become the NHL’s biggest fashion showcase.“Every year it’s just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger,” says Gina Gostisbehere, who organized this year’s Hurricanes jackets after it became clear her husband, Shayne, and his teammates were bound for the playoffs.“In the last year alone they have become a phenomenon,” says Claire Crouse, whose husband, Lawson, plays on the Mammoth.There’s no spoken competition among partners on different teams; Gostisbehere and Crouse remain friends from their husbands’ time together on the Arizona Coyotes and hyped each other up through this year’s production process. But no one wants to be left behind, either. “I definitely wanted to make sure ours was up to scale, not just a homemade, DIY jacket,” Crouse says.Danielle Spurgeon, whose husband, Jared, captains the Minnesota Wild, estimates that the league-average playoff jacket costs around $500, a pricey commitment with its utility largely limited to one year. Spurgeon knows some teams’ jackets have neared $1,000, a drastic change from the not-too-distant past: She remembers wearing long-sleeved T-shirts for the 2014 playoffs that sold for about $50 each.So when Flyers goalie Dan Vladař made the final shootout stop against the Hurricanes to send his team to the playoffs, Alex Sanheim knew she needed to get to work. After celebrating at the arena with fellow wives and girlfriends, she huddled with a few of them to mock up ideas.As the regular season wound down, Sanheim had kept her eye on a black leather jacket. But she didn’t want to jinx the Flyers by ordering ahead of time. When the team clinched, she began purchasing the jackets almost immediately. They arrived within a week, after which Sanheim brought them to RushOrderTees, a Philadelphia business equipped for embroidery. The custom additions — Flyers branding on the front, right arm and back, as well as individual players’ names on the back and initials on the left arm — were finished in time for Philadelphia’s first home playoff game against the Penguins.Crouse, meanwhile, felt comfortable enough about Utah’s playoff chances to start planning in February. She and Victoria Stark, a senior designer for the Mammoth, embarked on the project together, using Salt Lake City businesses for production as a nod of appreciation for the local community’s embrace of the team after it relocated from Arizona in 2024.One night leading up to Utah’s first-ever home playoff game, Crouse and the other Mammoth wives and girlfriends gathered for dinner in Park City, a mountain town southeast of Salt Lake City. They shared a private room at a Japanese grill inside a five-star hotel, where Crouse led a toast: to the playoffs, to the history the Mammoth were making and to “how much heavy lifting these women do behind the scenes.”Then, to the room’s delight, Stark wheeled in a luggage cart with their black playoff jackets for everyone to wear for the first time.The belt loops on the Hurricanes’ burgundy jackets are shaped like the team’s logo of a tropical storm warning flag. (Courtesy Gina Gostisbehere)Eleven years ago, when the NHL’s now-most dominant player entered the league, its now-most dominant playoff jacket designer saw postseason attire as having a “piecemeal vibe.” But as her husband, Connor, went on to make history for the Edmonton Oilers, so too did Lauren Kyle McDavid change the world of hockey fashion.This year, Kyle McDavid’s high-end sportswear company, Sports Club Atelier, designed jackets for seven of the NHL’s 16 playoff teams, including all of the ones still alive. She also prepared a sample for the wives and girlfriends of Detroit Red Wings players, before they missed the playoffs with a late-season collapse.