2023-10-11 10:44:19
BarcelonaIn January 2023, on a hot day in Los Angeles, media personality Kim Kardashian went for a walk wearing a Roma football shirt from the 1997-98 season. “Is cool” she explained a few days later, adding that her son was a soccer nut. In fact, she took him months later to see Lionel Messi’s debut in Miami. “They’re comfortable and beautiful,” Kardashian argued. It wasn’t the only one who thought so. Fashion and football, apparently two worlds that walk far from each other, have been getting closer. And, of course, the epicenter of this love affair is Italy. It couldn’t be any other place.
“The big clothing brands are dedicated to changing the design of the shirts every year to make money. OK, we accept that. What we ask of them is that if they have to do it, that it be betting on beautiful designs and that have relationship with our city,” said Francesco Peghin, the president of Padua, a historic club that now plays in Tercera. This year, the team’s third kit is turquoise green, inspired by the marble tables of the historic Caffè Pedrocchi, an elegant venue that has been open for more than 200 years. The shirt, made by the Macron Sports brand with the support of the Superfly Lab agency, has been a huge success. The photo session, instead of being done with the team’s players, was done with models. An increasingly common occurrence, especially in the city that leads this revolution: Venice.
In recent seasons, a lot of people wait every summer to see what the Venezia shirts will look like, a club that currently plays in the Italian Second Division. Since an American investment group took control of the club, it has been strongly committed to fashion. In a conversation with the magazine Esquire, the club’s brand director, Ted Philipakos, recalled that when they arrived in the city of canals the club had “no Instagram or Twitter account… Internationally it was little known”. In a city where the residents have been driven out by mass tourism, only loyal fans followed the adventures of the club, used to suffering in lower categories. What the owners did was to popularize the brand internationally using the shirts and the fame of Venice to generate resources. “Beyond what happens on the pitch, we have bet to take care of the image. Bet on the mix of football culture with a wider culture. An exchange between football and fashion, between football and other facets of modern culture,” explains Philipakos. If the shareholders had acquired the club that bears the name of one of the most famous cities in the world, it was necessary to take advantage of it, right? One of the first moves was to break with then-sponsor Nike and sign with Italian sportswear company Kappa. “They have a wonderful heritage going back to the ’90s, when they were a very powerful brand, with a retro aesthetic that we wanted to bring back,” says Philipakos. The club agreed with Kappa to offer the club’s managers creative control of the design. The idea was clear: they could not allow, as happens in most clubs, the brand to decide the design and cause, at times, disenchantment among the fans.
The result was a collection of four shirts for the 2021-22 season inspired by the city’s best-known colors and corners. Since then, every year the shirts have surprised by entrusting the work to the designer Mirko Borsche. The club has introduced shirts that recall the gondoliers, the colors of the flag of the Republic of Venice and the light when the sun falls on the lagoon. Every year, people sell them out online. People who probably don’t even know which players play in Venice. People who don’t even know if they win or lose games. “Girls wear them to music festivals, boys wear them when they go to university. We sell them in over seventy countries, it’s crazy. 96% of sales are from outside Italy,” says Philipakos, who admits it was key to promote the shirts by doing photo shoots with models, especially women, rather than footballers. “It was a way of saying that everyone can use it, that you can wear the shirt every day”, adds this man of Greek origin who now combines his work in Venice with that of CEO at Kallithea, a Greek club bought by them shareholders of Venezia, which is betting on the same path with T-shirts that models wear.
From the 80s to the present
The relationship between fashion and football was born in the 80s in Italy, when the country’s big clubs saw that they could do business by selling shirts to fans. Until then, people wore a handmade scarf to the stadium. During those years they began to make official products of the clubs and shirts that the fans could buy. The big Italian teams redid their club crests, to make them attractive to young people, hiring designers. In 1990, when the World Cup was held in Italy, the opening match was held in one of the capitals of fashion, Milan. And the organizers staged a fashion show on the grass, shortly before watching Cameroon shock Maradona’s Argentina. Combining fashion and football was no longer a sin.
And some designers have shown it, like the Russian Gosha Rubchinskiy with his SS18 Collection, where he took shirts and tracksuits precisely from the 1990 World Cup. Also brands like Balenciaga and Bikkembergs would make collections clearly inspired by this sport. In fact, Belgian Dirk Bikkembergs, who admittedly didn’t know much about football, became obsessed with the sport when he arrived in Italy, to the extent that in 2005 he bought a modest regional club, FC Fossombrone, to make it your personal experiment. It was renamed FC Bikkembergs Fossombrone. “We will explore the relationship between aesthetics and sports, between fashion and football,” he said, without ceasing to take care of what was happening on the pitch. The club, which was based in a small town in the Marche region, started playing in flashy shirts and managed to get promoted from fifth to fourth. In 2010, Bikkemberbergs put an end to the experiment and sold the club.
But it has surely been in the last decade when fashion has entered through the big door to the king sport. In recent years, French PSG have understood this and have taken great care of their brand with deals such as Nike to make jerseys inspired by the famous 90s basketball collection Air Jordan. It makes sense, because PSG is the club of one of the capitals of fashion. And a club very linked to design, because in its early years an important designer was its president and designed one of the most beautiful shirts of all time: Daniel Hechter, who had become rich in fashion ready to wear and was a partner of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. In recent years, PSG has understood that it was necessary to create complicities with a street, urban aesthetic to promote people to wear their clothes all day, as they had done in the 90s with Nike’s fashion inspired by the basketball player Michael Jordan.
In Italy, the success of Venezia has inspired other clubs, such as Inter and Roma. The Romans, also in American hands, have just closed an agreement with Adidas where they demand designs with a retro and urban touch. In the case of Roma, the element of identity has also been key, that people feel that the shirt has a meaning. So when the club ran out of a main shirt sponsor last year, instead of leaving the space empty they put four letters: SPQR. That is, Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Latin phrase meaning the Senate and the Roman People, referring to the government of the old Roman Empire. The shirt sold much more than before. “If people perceive that you make beautiful designs, but without an underlying idea, it shows,” says Philipakos.
Examples like these have been spreading across Europe. England’s Arsenal, for example, have signed a deal with designer label LA Boutique 424 to create club wear away from football, allowing them to wear official products from gunners at the street. Fashion inspired by the hip hop, l’skate and other urban fashions. In fact, one of the club’s latest initiatives has been to commission designer Stella McCartney for a streetwear line, in addition to taking care of the women’s team shirt. A few years ago, Real Madrid offered the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto to design their third kit, in black with an engraved dragon.
In recent years, Barça has also sought complicity with popular artists, such as Bad Gyal, to make it clear that the shirt is not just for going to the stadium. This year, for example, the club signed an agreement with Dutch streetwear brand Patta, which allows them to use the club’s crest and colours. Although the company was founded in 2004, the Patta clothing line was born in 2010 with two seasonal collections. Making pacts with artists such as graffiti artists, musicians and urban sportsmen like skaters, Patta has made a space for himself and can now collaborate with Barça. “Creating bridges with ideas that are not from sport allows you to remove the shirts from the sports field. We have looked for elegance and Venetian images, other clubs are looking to create complicity with the new urban trends, to make the young make it their own,” admits Philipakos.
A new life for the shirts of the past
The relationship between fashion and football has begun to explore new paths, outside the clubs. For example, with people like the designer Diana Al Shammari, who goes by the name The Football Gal and bet on taking old football shirts and making them your own. If wearing shirts from the past is a fashion that drives collectors crazy, Al Shammari has opted to go further by modifying them and sewing new details on them by hand. In October 2022, for example, he introduced a model where he took a third kit from the Japanese national team from years ago, a little-remembered design, to make it more beautiful with cherry blossoms. Recently, Barça player Jules Kounde arrived on the field before a game against Celta wearing it. Kounde is part of the long list of footballers passionate about fashion, like Héctor Bellerín.
Another example of the growing complicity between fashion and football is the Mexican Antonio Zaragoza, who left his country to train in Paris, where he created the brand Liberal Youth Ministry. Taking inspiration from youth fashions, he first made clothes influenced by video games. But this year he arrived at Paris Fashion Week with a collection he made for the soccer team he is a fan of, Chivas de Guadalajara. “I’m a big fan of football, I like what Mexico represents and unites people”, he says. “There is an elitist fashion, away from the streets. And a fashion that wants to see what happens outside the palaces. I like a lively fashion. And that’s why I saw football and Chivas as ideal,” he added on the day of the collection’s presentation. “When I created my brand in 2016 it was called Weimar Youth, in homage to a poem by William Burroughs that for me represents the first acts of rebellion, the first punks of history I want to talk about a global youth. I like everything that talks about freedom. And for many people, going to a stadium is freedom.”
The success of the football aesthetic, especially the retro, has in recent years led some clothing brands, such as Umbro, to launch collections inspired by 90’s shirts without any association with any club. Simply, betting on an aesthetic that has already found a space outside the stadiums. They have done it by copying the designs of the 80s and 90s, with shirts and jumpers that refer to the images of international players of those years. This year, the Louis Vuitton brand has worked with the musician and artist Pharrell Williams, who opted for a collection inspired by football shirts to parade in Paris. In fact, wearing football shirts on the street has been renamed a Bloke core, a trend that has been made fashionable by people like the influencer Italian Clara Ferragni. It’s about wearing a football shirt with skirts, shorts or branded bottles.
Some brands like Voll Damm beer have launched their football-style shirt, proving the success of clothing that was previously only worn to sweat it out playing or suffering in the stands. Now you can take her to a fancy restaurant: some will look at you with disapproval and others with admiration.
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