Ashtyn Butuso: The Courtside Baddies are Making a Stink
Barbie would’ve killed for this hot pink toilet.
Barbie would’ve killed for this hot pink toilet. It’s not every day that you see a toilet and think ooh, sunshine and rainbows. I mean, I guess you would if you went for a long run right after downing two cups of coffee, but you get my point. The toilet sits at the edge of a pool, and from its bright blue (probably excessively chlorinated) water, a single arm emerges, resting on the toilet seat. I’ve seen this image at least a half a dozen times in undergrad. Only, instead of an empty can of White Claw in the hand, there’s a… basketball.
Flagrant Magazine’s fourth issue once again subverted stereotypes in its typical 1970’s bold colors that meet 1990’s anti-fashion and counterculture aesthetic. But as I look through each issue, including my personal favorite, number six, I find myself hovering over the pink toilet, which represents both a reinvention of trash talk and street roots. It makes a stink.
I first came across Flagrant Mag during the pandemic because my eyeballs were literally drying up from being glued to yet another Love Island episode, and I needed a reprieve. Around this time, the options were the following: join a run club, bake sourdough, or scroll through TikTok. Who would’ve known that all of us being trapped at home would mark the renaissance of the written word? Enter the Substack boom.
When I was a kid, Complex and Sports Illustrated reigned supreme. And as I looked at my Kobe Bryant’s The Most Hated issue from Complex Mag’s… whatever the hell that issue number was… I considered how much potential had been left off the table. Don’t get me wrong, I still see the makers of those magazines as among the trailblazers who brought sports into the mainstream media conversation. But dare I ask, for all of the zine platforms out there building culture, where, or rather, what, is it? We keep hearing about culture and community, the putting together of so-called third spaces, to the extent that it feels like they’re being commodified and monetized. Yet, nobody has been able to define the word for me.
“‘Culture’ is something that people can come together around, and they understand the why and what makes it special. Culture is being co-opted by a lot of corporations because they have the money. At some point, it’s not going to be culture. It’s corporate.”
Ashtyn Butuso’s reputation has preceded her name in almost every conversation I’ve had about her. Even one of my mentors, whose taste aligns with the simple, 90s SportsCenter-style graphics, is high praise. I gathered that there’s no real way to describe what Butuso, founder and editor-in-chief of Flagrant Mag, has built with the media platform. Is it a community? Is it an ecosystem? Is it a media juggernaut? Is it a magazine? By the time we sit down for this conversation, what I do know is that it exemplifies her definition of the word culture.
Butuso greets me from her home office in New York City after a whirlwind Cannes Lions experience. Perhaps the only event that outmatched the chaos for marketing professionals and, apparently, Lando Norris, was the Knicks NBA Championship parade that took over her city a few weeks ago.
“Oh my god, I’m so excited to be here, to be in one place. I can’t even explain how excited I am to not be leaving for at least… I think I have to travel at the end of July, but I have got a couple of weeks.”
She’s been on the other side of the microphone, interviewing countless athletes and artists for OffBall, but I can’t imagine that she’s any more enthusiastic about recounting her experiences. We all love what we do, but burnout has an interesting way of squashing even the most passionate. Even her Persian cat (who currently sports a lion cut that makes him… hairless), Karl-Anthony Towns, gives a weary nod as he saunters by.
I decide to throw a softball, a question about a recent segment she did with WNBA standout Azzi Fudd. Fudd’s been asked the typical performance-centric and gossip-focused questions several times. Whether or not she thinks of it on the spot, Butuso redirects her, causing her to stop, smile, and reflect. She’s curious about her most intrusive thoughts during press interactions.
“Intrusive thoughts are so interesting to me, because sometimes they’re very dark, other times they’re so silly, and I’m just like, where do these come from? What is the psychological explanation for these?”
We joke about what we’d want to do during exhausting press junkets while admiring the level of professionalism with which the current crop of elite athletes carry themselves. They’re always on, but Butuso is intent on digging past the what to get to the why, or perhaps even the who. It’s the kind of thought process that allows her to rapidly shift between fun, hot-take moments and heavy emotional reflection. In that way, her mind seems like a perfect representation of her overstimulated, constantly moving, rapidly evolving environment; it’s one that she is both deeply embedded in and eager to distance herself from.
Nowhere has that crossroads been more visible than with the recent flurry of sports excitement in her city. Butuso’s husband went to Villanova, so both Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart have been household names since their collegiate days. She managed to grab a few pictures among all the crowds, some of which have appeared on OffBall’s newsletter and social media. But there’s one in particular that she keeps coming back to.
“It’s the image of fans standing up on light posts, street signs, and subway station overhangs. It’s not always true that taking a photo of a moment shows you exactly what it feels like, but those images really do. You can look at them and actually understand the magnitude of the moment, and how New York celebrated it.
We were talking to people at the parade, a couple of older men who were just like, ‘We’ve waited for this,’ in a way that you can’t even imagine. And you’ve just seen the struggle that Knicks fans have gone through. So having all of that context and seeing an image that’s just people, as far as the eye can see, climbing on s***, waiting for the floats to come down—it was such a beautiful, really emotional thing.”
Sparing no detail, she describes everything from the crowds to the specifics of how she and her husband managed to go the whole day without eating, having walked from Park Slope to the Manhattan Bridge, only to realize that they were getting sick. Not once does she mention anything remotely celebrity-related. It’s a striking counter to the flurry of posts I’ve seen from other sports media platforms that have all focused on Jalen Brunson’s wife, the celebrities who’ve suddenly become Knicks fans, or the tenth odd post of Timothée Chalamet (which touché, I know he’s a lifelong Knicks fan and not a bandwagon supporter, but still).
There’s something authentic in the way Butuso captures the feeling of sport, because she’s focused on the things she actually finds interesting. Where most media entrepreneurs build a platform for a pre-existing audience, it occurs to me that, other than the desire to create a community for women to be fans of sport, she has no clearly defined demographic. Her approach hasn’t been too dissimilar from the 2026 Knicks branding team in that way. An audience has come together out of a shared experience, a culture. In the Knicks case, that is professional basketball; in Butuso’s case, the culture is Flagrant Mag itself.
And that’s why it’s wrong to claim that Flagrant Mag’s story began in 2019. Twenty-five years ago, before she became a New York transplant, Butuso was raised in a household that avidly consumed football, soccer, and NASCAR. As she and her family were either always at a sporting event or glued to the TV, Butuso became exposed to basketball. Specifically, the Portland Trailblazers.
“My very first memory would probably be the 2000 Western Conference Finals. The Blazers were playing the Lakers, and my parents were going to the games and renting out spaces for all of us to watch. That was a very competitive series and ended in our heartbreak. I was like eight, I think. And that’s when I first learned about the gravity that sports have and that they can ruin people’s days.
You play along, and you feel those things as well, but you don’t really know what you’re playing along with. And I think that week always stuck with me. That team–Brian Grant, Damon Stoudamire, all those guys—was pretty formative when I learned, ‘Oh, there’s such emotion tied to this.’”
Instead of asking her about her most fond memory from any individual games of that season, I try my hand at an Ashtyn Butuso-style question and ask her… about the jerseys. It’s a topic borne out of a major retail crisis we’re seeing at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Everything is more expensive, but does the quality live up to the price point?
“If something feels a little bit uncool because it feels out of date, I sort of like that vibe. So I’m always going to be drawn to the old jerseys. Our championship team had jerseys with a very cool, rounded font and script. Those are probably our coolest.
I also think there’s an oversaturation of jerseys in the market. I don’t think we need city jerseys every single year. I think we should let things breathe and make them more exciting moments. But obviously, Adam Silver is not going to do that.”
I’m reminded of a previous conversation I had with someone in grassroots European football whose complaint about the current price of Manchester United kits led to a broader philosophical question of: who exactly is this for? Historically, sports have been a democratic, accessible institution to a certain degree. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone can afford VIP or box tickets. But becoming a sports fan hasn’t always had the craziest barrier to entry. Nowadays, to be a sports fan, you must buy the jersey, pay for exorbitantly-priced tickets, and score special event passes to experiences like F1’s annual showcase. For goodness sake, cricket in this country has become a luxury institution.
I take this opportunity to scroll through Flagrant Mag’s catalogue. Apart from their magazine, they also operate their own retail line, which includes shirts and their all too famous basketball shorts. The colors immediately stick out in their retro glory. Butuso is particularly excited about a muted pistachio color she believes is emblematic of “having a good time.” But what I’m left mulling over is that the logo itself has been stitched on. In recent times, how many clothing items have you purchased that use high-quality fabric, feature interesting colors, and have embroidered lettering? Sure, the general public can’t afford non-essential purchases any more than they could during the pandemic, but we’ve learned that for the right quality, many will click the buy now button. It’s not about whether the professional football jersey is too expensive; it’s about whether the quality merits the price point or if owning the item brings you into a culture, a shared experience with others. And often, the answer is no to both.
Which leads us to Butuso’s largest critique of storytelling and narrative building in sport. Throwing around the word culture without defining it for yourself. She and I both find agreement that the word does not carry any singular meaning. For instance, I perceive it, in the sports context, to mean everything that happens off the field, court, and track. But her criticism is less about the individual denotation and more about this monotonous aesthetic that has resulted from it. Everyone wants to do culture, which means that everyone looks… the same.
While she doesn’t quite remember the Kobe cover I reference, she does think about a similar one from that era that features both Shaq and Kobe and points out just how similar my description and hers are.
“I am less drawn to magazines—and any kind of storytelling—that feel a little contrived. I feel like these magazines that do culture and sport, or just culture, have sort of a homogenous feel about them in the way things are shot and colorized, the photography, and the way the photos are edited. Yes, we’re culture, but do we exist just to exist? Or are we actually telling stories that maybe mean something?”
Lately, it feels like everyone is going for a suave, sleek look. Or uses cooler tones and looks edgy. Not everything has to look like a BTS album cover, y’all. Now, in truth, some magazines sport a minimalistic aesthetic because it aligns with the kind of stories they tell and articles they publish. But there’s almost a social conditioning, a Pavlovian-style response taking place; the more we define culture as a singular aesthetic, the more that sports fans and audiences come to either accept that as the standard or leave because they don’t. Unfortunately, women are disproportionately affected by the latter.
Going back to her earlier definition of the term, Butuso rejects culture as an aesthetic or commodity. She doesn’t even see it as a community, at least not in the corporate sense of the word. It’s about deriving meaning out of an experience.
“To me, I think culture is almost a synonym for cool or taste. Take the Met Gala, for example. Now it’s about to be pretty uncool, I would say. I think people are starting to tire of it. But I think most people would still say, ‘Oh, that’s a cultural tent pole.’
Culture shouldn’t mean you’re repackaging Taylor Swift posts and calling it culture. It has to feel like it means something. Because if you break down what a culture actually is, it’s a shared collective of things that mean something to people. It’s so much more than just fashion, music, movies.”
Not to bring the Knicks back into this conversation (god forbid someone from home sees this piece because I hail from deep Warriors territory), but there’s something to be said about how a team based in New York City has managed to connect with little kids in Mumbai, India. They’re not wearing the Jalen Brunson jerseys as some kind of fashion statement, nor are they retweeting Timothée Chalamet memes because they watched Marty Supreme. As Butuso mentioned, the photographs she took at the parade, the jersey, and the meme evoke a feeling that connects with the people who come across them. Maybe it’s the way Brunson represents endurance and resilience. Or Chalamet’s general unseriousness, offering humor during a very dark time in the history of our world. Perhaps it’s even witnessing thousands of people coming together, including the likes of Ben Stiller and Mariska Hargitay, to rally for a team’s victory and the hope that collective support inspires. That is what disruption looks like.
I find myself questioning the meaning of the word flagrant, almost as much as I am curious about Butuso’s interpretation of the term culture.
“I’m so sick of the word unapologetically. I swear that’s just another word that we’re just saying. But being flagrant is causing a stink, or making a scene. And that’s what we’re doing when we’re putting toilets on the cover, or we’re including trans people in the magazine. We want to be a little bit controversial. We want to be standing up for the things that we believe in. And we want to be outwardly making certain people uncomfortable or mad in that way, because that’s the point of all of this.”
Butuso doesn’t inherently take any issue with the phrasing; her problem is the weird grandstanding, the intentional abstraction that a lot of sports media indulges in. We never quite know what they’re talking about, and that gives them the power to attain mass appeal; they’re for everyone because they’re not really for anyone. While I don’t ask her outright, I consider that Butuso knows that Flagrant Mag’s visual aesthetic, color palettes, or choice in themes are not going to be universally approved. But for the people that they’re for, they’re 100% for.
Flagrant Mag’s most recent issue, titled Married to the Game, on paper, is a celebration of the WNBA’s 30th season. Butuso mentions that “of course, we wanted to do some stuff with pearls,” as if I would know what that means.
“Everyone says ‘They’re married to the game.’ One of the articles in it, we talked to probably a dozen W players, technically they were Unrivaled players, and we asked them when they first fell in love with basketball, and how they keep the spark alive.”
It’s the second part of Butuso’s editorial vision that catches me off guard. The players are married to the game. But what about their wives?
“We’re not anti-WAG culture. There is a level of the game being the focus for these people. That is their relationship. Their relationship is basketball. The flagrant part is that while it’s not a groundbreaking thing to say that these women are not just housewives, it’s still something worth saying.”
The most obvious WAG that comes to my mind is a certain billionaire whose wedding is taking place this upcoming weekend. In true Ashtyn Butuso fashion, a single mention of Taylor Swift turns into a 10-minute tangent. Man, is it worth it. We trade theories about the nuptials. My theory is that the wedding has already taken place a la Tomdaya. Hers is that it’s actually taking place at MSG. We talk about the castle and the red carpet, the security and the guests, the crazy traffic, and the fact that Butuso cannot seem to catch a single breath even on her off-week from travel.
As she speaks about Taylor’s positioning in this conversation about, dare I say, WAG culture, we find ourselves back at her original point. Obviously, everyone knows that Taylor has a life outside of American football and the Kansas City Chiefs. And while that might not be groundbreaking to say, Butuso would most likely frame that as a relationship story between the spouse and the sport.
Most of Flagrant Mag’s direct competitors are still trying to find a seat at the table. In fact, they’re fighting over the same seat. That’s what it means to fit into a culture, rather than building one. It occurs to me that much of Butuso’s current job boils down to a single task: testing how far she can go, the furthest she can travel to before she falls over the edge. Visually, that has looked like rejecting the sleek, suave, clean aesthetic that’s expected of sports media.
“We’re very maximalist, and that is maybe like our main North star is just sort of being over the top about something, whether that’s color or number of objects in a shot or a ridiculous concept. Married to the Game’s shoot was ridiculous and funny. So I think we’re just over the top, and whatever that results in is what it is.
We definitely try not to play cool. There’s usually like a little joke, a visual joke, sort of woven throughout it, or sometimes things take on a more activist lens as well. But yeah, I’d say overall just maximalist, over-the-top, and sort of ridiculous.”
The last part describes Butuso’s personality to a T. Her storytelling style, from the anecdotes that she unleashes to her sense of humor, is all maximalist, over-the-top, and sort of ridiculous. But more importantly, you’re in it with her. When she cracks a joke about some insane piece of gossip she’s heard courtside, you’re right there with her. I guess that what a community, or perhaps even a culture, boils down to: people coming together to be in on something, whether that’s a joke, a shared piece of history, or a sports team. Flagrant Mag’s Discord community has a bit of a chicken-or-egg story in that regard. Truthfully, the origin story of its existence is something that Butuso is either not able to recall or simply doesn’t find memorable. The one thing she does note is that it has grown in an era where digital media has become a double-edged sword.
“In the past, people didn’t feel so empowered to degrade everyone else’s knowledge or everyone’s feelings about their team. The internet has created a space where everyone can do so, whereas it was previously a select few. Now, anyone can take that role on, and it’s made everything a darker, less fun place to be.
But it’s also a double—not a double-edged sword. It’s a catch-22. Not really. It’s something, I’m not sure.”
She laughs, struggling to figure out the correct idiom, proverb, or something. I’m not sure.
“Because obviously so much has been born of the internet as well. We have an entire Discord community. They all hang out in real life now because they’ve all met on the internet, and we met them on the internet, and it’s all very lovely. I just wish people would use that power for good.”
Butuso mentioned the word unapologetically as the trendiest marketing word of the hour, but I’m convinced that the crown goes to authenticity. In an attempt to universalize every experience, every team, and every athlete, we’ve distilled people’s unique eccentricities to something more commodified.
“Everybody needs to be in on this one thing, where maybe it’s not even interesting to them, and maybe it shouldn’t be. But now everybody has to have their hand in everything—especially sports. And it feels like that just makes it a little bit less special. I don’t think sports will ever lose its heart, but I do think corporations would love to try to make that happen.”
It’s an artful balance between preserving the spirit of sport and gatekeeping. I jokingly mention how everyone has become both a Knicks supporter and a BTS fan in the past year. But I understand Butuso’s point. Not everything has been designed for everyone; a lot of people glued to their screens for the World Cup wouldn’t bat an eye at a single NBA game. And why should they? The point is to foster dialogue and connection so people naturally find the spaces that they actually see themselves in. I might be the target audience for Flagrant Mag’s shorts and Discord community, but my neighbor will die on the hill that is the beige pilates princess aesthetic. The damn shorts were not made for her, so why should she buy them?
I’m intrigued by the kind of retro look that Butuso and her team have gone for, considering that I never quite get the sense that she dwells on nostalgia. I find myself corrected.
“I’m always longing for the past. I just feel like we have lost the plot so much. I think about 2016, and I’m like, ‘God, I miss her. What a year,’ you know? And it wasn’t even that long ago, but I’m always longing—to a detriment, to an unrealistic expectation. Like, I know that things weren’t as good as I’m imagining, but it’s just that s*** sucks so much these days.
And that’s obviously not the truth, but I find myself longing constantly. Longing for a flip phone. Longing for a world where we didn’t know where each other were all the time. Longing to not have the habitual need to pull out my phone for no reason and then be like, ‘Why did I just pull out my phone again? What’s going on?’ And I think that’s part of where Flagrant Mag was born. I think it’s that longing and the remembering that being analog and sitting down with something and reading it can feel that good.”
God, every trend feels so exhausting these days. It’s like we live in one never-ending overstimulation crisis. A black shirt with a tombstone that reads Here Lies Digital catches my eye on the website. It feels ironic considering that it exists on a… digital website. But perhaps that’s the point. However you feel about the current state of media, you can’t help but acknowledge how disruptive that statement is. It’s making a stink.
Karl-Anthony Towns walks into the frame again, not too dissimilar to how his namesake makes his appearances on the basketball court. Butuso already knows this is going to be a busy news cycle with the combination of America’s 250th anniversary, the TnT wedding, and the regular onslaught of matches happening throughout the summer. After the World Cup is some other… thing. Curaçao has been on her mind; the story of this incredibly small island’s debut on the world’s largest stage for football practically writes itself.
I tell her about a grandmother in Pondicherry in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India who owns a small clothing stall. Like so many people, she was selling jerseys of major football stars. Ronaldo. Beckham. Mbappé. And Lamine Yamal. She’d proudly hold them up to the camera and smile as she talked about them. Except Ronaldo became ‘Naruto,’ Beckham became ‘B Com,’ Mbappé became ‘Mappala’ (which translates to son-in-law in Tamil), and Yamal… well. He became ‘Lakshmi Ammal,’ a goddess. And thanks to her, not only has Lamine Yamal become venerated by the locals as some kind of divine figure, but her business has exploded thanks to the virality of the clips. Today, she still performs arthi for Yamal, a teenager from Spain, who probably wouldn’t have the slightest idea about what is going on with this grandma, her clothing stall, and the religious platform she has given him. In deep Messi territory, Lakshmi Ammal has become the new symbol of hope.
“That’s so hilarious! I’m on her Instagram. She has 83,000 followers.”
Butuso immediately makes note of it. It’s the kind of story that reminds her of what culture actually is. I guess that its gravity rests in just how unplanned and accidental it is. This grandma is getting more traction during the World Cup cycle than many prominent retail brands in the giant buildings across the street from her.
Making a stink is not about making a larger statement about the world or being intentionally provocative for the sake of being provocative. Disruption, in Flagrant Mag’s case, boils down to one simple thing: it’s simply what Butuso and her team actually like. And the culture is built on it. One pink toilet (and surviving the weekend madness of what is being called the American Royal Wedding) at a time.
“I don’t know if it’s the castle or the red carpet, but every new piece of information that comes out, it feels like we’re getting further away from something that could be real.”
By Niki Iyer