You Don't Need Football for Good Football Clothes
It used to be the case that, should you opt to wear a football jersey, you were highly likely to be a fan of football. Call it the “Oh, you’re wearing a Metallica tee? Name three songs” or “My culture is not your costume” mindset.
You could smell a fake fan from a mile away, partly because real footie fans often came with the smell of beer and sweat. And atop the hill of jersey makers was Umbro, the athleticwear brand that started in the back of a pub in 1924 (and would eventually produce the kits for 15 of the 16 teams in the 1966 World Cup).
What a difference a century makes.
Umbro is still churning out traditional athletic gear, but its recent string of fashion collaborations — from Copenhagen’s Stine Goya to Japan’s VERYTAGE to London’s Secondhalf.pdf — epitomizes that you don't actually need football to make great football clothes. We’re far past the point when you need to know your corner kick from your center spot because Umbro’s historic vibes carry more than enough weight through logo alone to turn any collab into a screamer. (That’s slang for a powerful shot, FYI.) There’s a symbiosis here: the tangential relation to football via Umbro adds some edge, but just as key is the energy brought by brands far outside the realm of sportswear.
Honing that “Umbro edge” took time. The brand first got the juice in the mid-90s, when Blur’s Damon Albarn and Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher each repped Umbro in major ways — Albarn with a Chelsea home shirt in Japanese fashion magazine Crossbeat; Gallagher rocking an Umbro drill top onstage. “An Umbro tracksuit on anyone is a sports tracksuit, but [Liam Gallagher] managed to make it look like the most desirable item of clothing,” Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian later said. “He managed to make it look like Gucci or something.”
The creep toward fashion proper, meanwhile, started with a 2002 link-up with Paul Smith — the first clothing-inclusive partnership between a luxury label and sportswear brand — and has since included major collabs with Supreme, Palace, Kim Jones, and Balenciaga.
More than two decades into the fashionification of Umbro, releases like its second Stine Goya collab signal how far it's come. (In part because the minimalist Danish womenswear brand feels as tonally removed from laddy football pitches as possible.)
Titled “Where We Meet,” the collection taps into the greasy spoon diners and pubs of 90s Britain where football fans met for matches, with a distinctly artisanal twist. Collared jerseys rework the Umbro crest into a lace pattern, a T-shirt is given a hand-painted checkerboard motif, and a sweatshirt is covered in the kinds of graffiti scrawl you’d likely see in the pub’s bathroom between match breaks.
A few continents away, Japanese label VERYTAGE Umbro drill shirts into elegant pullovers fit for its distinctly craft-forward ethos. KIDILL, meanwhile, went full freak with glow-in-the-dark tracksuits inspired by magicians — each jacket and pair of pants can be tightened or loosened by dozens of adjusters.
The recent World Cup pandemonium might’ve served as a reminder of just how culturally relevant football is to billions of people, but the breadth of these Umbro collabs proves that the sport’s OG outfitter doesn’t need to hit the pitch to cook.
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