The coolest shirts of all time?
In the late 1980s, Adidas made us all fall in love with chevrons
Now, I’ve got a little social experiment for you. The next time you’re in your local, sit down with your pals or even approach that old bloke who’s always at the bar and somehow strike up a conversation about the European Championship of 1988. I’ll lay a small wager with you here and now regarding which topics will come up in that discussion.
Tournament logo? Not a chance. Mascot? Ditto. Official theme music? You’re having a laugh. Some things did stand out, and they were mainly on the pitch: it’s likely that you’ll reminisce about Ruud Gullit’s dreadlocks and Marco van Basten’s glorious volley in the final, and if your local happens to be an Irish pub, then Ray Houghton’s goal to defeat England will be mentioned within seconds.
However, there’s one component of Euro 88 I can guarantee will come up. It’s the one way in which that year’s European Championship was truly a landmark tournament – a Rubicon moment in football. Its kits.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘game changer’ as “a newly introduced element or factor that changes an existing situation or activity in a significant way”. In the world of football kits, then, those produced by Adidas, worn by the Netherlands and West Germany (the hosts) and unveiled before Euro 88 were 100 per cent game changers. They have gone on to gain hallowed status in the kit world – and as that world has grown, so, too, has the influence of these strips. They have had an impact on all kits that followed but also, as football shirts have spread into streetwear,
their tentacles of influence have entered the fashion world. These two seminal jerseys have a lot of explaining to do as to why we ended up in a world where football shirts are now spotted on rap stars, grime artists, skate kids and catwalks almost as often as they’re seen on the terraces.
It was these two kits that laid the foundation for the proliferation of ‘crazy kits’ which came along soon after and grew even wilder into the early-to-mid-1990s, as brands, designers and teams let loose their creative juices. It was these two kits that led us towards the unholy trinity of Hull’s tiger print, Arsenal’s bruised banana and Norwich’s bird droppings. This era’s style of football shirt which so enraged traditionalists at the time is the same that – as stylists would say – is ‘so hot right now’ .
The pair of Adidas outfits in question are so iconic, they barely need an introduction. That Dutch shirt – yes, that one, with a sort-of arrow motif that makes you point towards your chest and draw a crazy pattern in homage – and its illustrious stablemate worn by West Germany – yes, that shirt, with a geometric pattern that induces another fit of frenzied chest-drawing and was more associated with Italia 90, which we’ll come to a bit later – were unleashed on an unsuspecting world at the same summer tournament three decades ago.
But, like all game changers, these stylish, groundbreaking creations dazzled our senses by design, not by accident. They were made by people going outside the norm, trusting in belief, guts and no little talent. While these two classic kits wear the fingerprints of some legendary, era-defining footballers, their genetic identity is entwined with the DNA of artistic, leftfield creatives given the freedom to create. So, before we meet the players who brought it all together into an eye-catching final image: a little historical perspective, first.
For nearly a century, the football shirt world had been a staid and traditional one. Apart from an odd tweak here and there, most tops
were as plain and pure as can be. Then the 1970s crashed into existence and ushered in some seismic shifts. Team badges became standard; manufacturers’ logos were finally visible to all; and by the early 1980s, shirt sponsorship had become the new norm. Battles were fought over team colours, club badges were altered, and unusual patterns were introduced.
It was in the mid-80s, with the use of a new technology called sublimation, that things really began to change. Le Coq Sportif – by then Adidas-owned – brought in and tinkered about with shirts’ shadow, stripes and shade; consider the efforts sported by Aston Villa, Everton and Chelsea in the early-to-mid-80s. Umbro picked up the baton and played around with diamonds and other patterns, too. But the football kit world’s first significant splash, and indicator of what was to come, was the beautiful, dual-pinstripe Hummel number that adorned the Danish Dynamite team of the 1986 World Cup.
Two years later, the kits adopted by West Germany and the Netherlands changed the game for good. But how did they come to be?
If you delve into the history of sport, and in particular the history of how all global sports tournaments operate and run, from official partners to branding, you’ll find at the beating heart of it a man who kicked back against his illustrious family and followed his own path; a man who had links to all the biggest players in the world of sport; a man with whom I have a personal fascination. That man is Horst Dassler (below centre), son of Adolf, or Adi, Dassler himself – hence ‘Adi-das’, for anyone still trying to work it out. So, no, it was never an acronym to denote All Day I Dream About Sport/soccer/sex.
As usual, it was Horst who played a key part in fighting against convention, instructing the Adidas design team to finally introduce some colour to the new design offerings for Euro 88. They took the opportunity to liven up the kit worn by the host nation, West Germany, which – apart from some cuffs in 1986 – had been pure monotone for the best part of 100 years.
Again, timing plays a very important part in this story. Whenever I’ve spoken with past designers from this era at brands like Adidas, Umbro and Nike, they all speak of a halcyon period with freedom and almost art-school approach to design, which isn’t so evident in our attention-detailed and controlled world of today. This had a big role in the formation of these two famous kits, and it’s how a young woman named Ina Franzmann, not long out of fashion school and fresh to the world of football kits, came to create the West Germany national team shirt.
David Bowie refused to listen to the radio because he didn’t want to make music that resembled what everyone else was doing. He wanted to be free to create and leave his own mark. Rather than follow trends, Bowie wanted to start new trends – or rebel (rebel) against them. It’s this way of thinking that can be found at the scene of Adidas’ Euro 88 motifs. Franzmann had an artistic bent and was given the licence to indulge it, without preconceptions of how a football kit ‘should’ end up looking.
Franzmann joined Adidas in 1984 and came from a background of fashion and design. Her grandfather had been a tailor and she initially worked with the Adidas tennis department. This, too, played its part. Tennis designs of the time experimented with colour and Ina, being – like Bowie – a true creative who believed that artists should look beyond the safety of their comfort zone, brought a fresh vision to the usual design process.
The design team had been following Horst’s instruction to add more colour to the shirt and quickly made a brave decision of their own: to introduce the colours of the German flag, which for decades had suffered from negative connotations that needed to be broken.
Franzmann brought her tailoring aesthetic to the table, searching for a way to make the players look as good as possible. After some trial and error, the now-iconic end design was eventually chosen.
Plenty of thought went into the final layout. It was designed to accentuate the shoulders, using the national flag’s colours. The chest’s bold geometric design echoed victory and movement, its passage upwards increasing the size of the silhouette and pointing towards victory. Horst and the players loved it.
The only fly in the ointment was that, in the end, this striking kit was worn for an inglorious defeat – on home soil, no less. Why, then, was it retained and used again at Italia 90?
In KIT TERMS, THE GERMANS VS THE DUTCH AT EURO 88 WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT MATCH... EVER
It’s at this point that another sporting giant enters the stage, and no less than Der Kaiser himself, Franz Beckenbauer.
Whenever a new tournament rolls around, a new kit is usually made. But Beckenbauer loved the Euro 88 design, and he had both the steely self-belief and power to instruct Adidas and the national team to keep it for the 1990 World Cup. West Germany, still managed by Beckenbauer, wore the design all the way to the final and to victory. To this day, it is more famously known as the Italia 90 kit.
If, however, it’s the Holy Grail you seek, we’ll just say that a green away version was made – and worn only once. In September 1991, a reunited Germany donned the shirt against England (above right) to celebrate playing a match as a unified country for the first time since 1938. Germany won, naturally.
Our other game-changing shirt was worn by the Netherlands, eventual winners of Euro 88. It was even more daring than West Germany’s effort, and in the context of what had gone on before, the radical design was something beyond belief. Words such as ‘bold’, ‘striking’ and ‘awful’ were bandied about, but, like it or loathe it, you couldn’t ignore it.
The two teams and their attention-arresting shirts did actually meet on the pitch, as the Dutch eliminated the hosts in Euro 88’s first semi-final. In kit terms, it was arguably the most important football match of all time, and certainly the most groundbreaking one. Things would never be the same again. The bravado behind these two kits captured the imagination and set a path for the future of footballing design.
The story reverberated into modern times when the Adidas design team, led by Jurgen Rank, produced an homage to the fabled tops for Germany at last summer’s World Cup, with a monochrome and dashes rendition for the defending champions (right).
It wasn’t the only kit at Russia 2018 serving as a tribute to designs from the late-80s and early-90s, which themselves were inspired by our pair of wunderkinds from Euro 88. Adidas gave the hosts a strip based on the one worn by the Soviet Union team that won Olympic gold 30 years previously, and also contributed modern interpretations for Spain, Argentina and Colombia, while Nike’s dazzling Nigeria top broke the internet and pre-order records alike.
These jerseys, and the other iterations that continue to multiply today, can all trace their DNA back to the game changers of Euro 88.
Even at the time, it didn’t take long for other sides to adopt the template design worn by Van Basten & Co. The Dutch never wore the almost mythical blue version that was meant as a change strip, but its red guise was seen when the Soviet Union – eventual finalists – beat England in Frankfurt. It formed the basis of West Germany’s green away kit at Italia 90, worn for the would-be champions’ semi-final victory against England, and the pattern also cropped up on various match shirts belonging to East Germany, Morocco, Argentina and the USA, as well as several club sides.
But that sublime design is, of course, forever associated with the Netherlands side that won Euro 88. Why? Because it was bold, because the players covered it with glory and because after those five tournament games, they never wore it again. Mythical status: complete.
AS THE KIT WORLD HAS GROWN, THE INFLUENCE HELD BY THESE TWO KITS HAS GROWN WITH IT