Fashion vs football
they say young people’s opportunities are limited these days, but I met a French girl in the summer who pilots drones for a living. I don’t remember the careers officer at my school suggesting this as a possibility, thirtysomething years ago. (“Have you thought of forestry?” That’s what mine said to me. I hadn’t. I haven’t since, either. Maybe it’s not too late? We’ll always need trees, and whatever else they have in forests — dirt?)
We were standing in the garden of a château in Burgundy as the Parisienne droner explained her business to me. Most of her work, she said, as one of her anxiety-inducing gizmos hovered above us, was on fashion shoots, filming zippy videos for broadcast on social media.
I mention this only because what drew me to her was not her remarkable dexterity with a remote control, but her T-shirt. It was gold, with long sleeves, and I recognised it instantly as the latest replica away strip of Venezia FC, the Serie B football club. Not that I am some sort of sportswear trainspotter (it says “Venezia” on it, helpfully) but because in my job it behoves me to keep up to speed on fashion trends. That T-shirt, I knew, was the acme of street-style sophistication. This was the first time I’d seen one in the wild.
In my lamentable French — no one ever suggested international diplomacy to me as a potential career — I explained that the magazine I work for was running a story about the recent phenomenon of replica football kits as fashion statements, with her Venezia shirt as the exemplar. She seemed Gallically unimpressed by this, but conceded with an eye-roll that, yes, lots of people had commented on it already, and asked her where it was from and how to buy one.
“What’s crazy,” she said, “is I don’t even like le foot.”
Well, yes. It is kind of crazy.
Back in the Esquire workspace, I told this story to my colleague, Miranda Collinge. Snap, said Miranda. Or words to that effect. She too had recently spotted a girl in her twenties wearing a Venezia FC shirt. Her sighting, shortly after mine, came in a still more incongruous setting: outside the polar-bear enclosure at a wildlife park in the Highlands of Scotland. (Could this, by cosmic coincidence, have been the Coco Chanel of the drone community on another far-flung remote-piloting assignment? Miranda thinks not. I didn’t ask for further elaboration but apparently this second girl was “definitely Scottish”.)
It doesn’t happen often, so forgive my making a thing of it, but here at Esquire we felt we were on to something. The style zeitgeist was pulsing through our fingers with unusual force. What was going on? Why was the football strip of a second-division Italian team suddenly the must-have summer ’fit for chic young things, from Chablis to the Cairngorms?
There’s no good reason I can see to be a Venezia fan unless you live in Venice, or have some close connection to the city. It’s not like following Juventus from afar, or Barcelona, or Liverpool. Venezia’s games are barely televised even inside Italy, let alone abroad. Even if they
were, there’d be little to be gained by watching them, since Venezia are not very good. And if it’s a purely aesthetic consideration, then I’ve always thought AC Milan have the prettiest kit of the Italians — and the added bonus that the club occasionally wins something. But that misses the point: the wearing of the Venezia shirt has nothing to do with supporting the team. It is not even necessary to know that it is a replica of the shirt worn by the players of Venezia FC. It has close to zero connection with le foot. It’s fashion.
Not high-street fashion, of the kind you find in Sports Direct: Yankees hats, Lakers vests, Chelsea training kits. Buying a Venezia shirt is more like buying a Supreme hoodie than it is like buying a replica shirt of your team, if you support a team. An English comparison might be if, say, Burnley suddenly saw its main competition as Dior and Gucci, for T-shirt sales, rather than Norwich and Reading, for Championship points. (The Burnley away strip is a fetching teal and claret, if anyone’s interested.)
On page 100, Esquire’s style director Charlie Teasdale, who first drew my attention to this curious phenomenon, reports from Venice on the remaking of a venerable, but not especially successful, football club as a niche fashion brand.
It’s a story that raises many questions for football clubs, including: why bother spending hundreds of millions on international superstars in a mad bid to win the Champions League and as a result sell more shirts (we could call this the PSG model), when you can hire a trendy design agency to shift your merch while you maintain affordable mediocrity?
In fact, why bother playing football at all? Maybe just invent a team name, come up with a fictional club crest and start selling the shirts. And, in fact, this all happened in the 1990s (of course it did), when a Japanese designer named Hirofumi Kiyonaga developed, in collaboration with Nike, a uniform for fans of a team that didn’t exist: FC Real Bristol.
You can still buy Real Bristol shirts today, alongside shirts from start-up brands such as Futsol, which are aimed, presumably, at dilettantish young men who fetishise traditional working-class pursuits — and uniforms — but wouldn’t dream of lowering themselves to doing the actual work of showing up and shouting encouragement/abuse from the stands.
High fashion has flirted with football iconography in the past; menswear aficionados will recall the work of the Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy, all the rage a few years ago for sticking slogans in Cyrillic script over Adidas football tops. But the Venice shirt is stranger still, because it’s a product of the club itself. And the thing is, while I don’t want one myself (not really my colour), I can see the appeal.
Funny old game.
on first inspection, professional football and men’s fashion make for unlikely teammates. One provides a terrifyingly competitive arena for a jet-setting elite of spoilt primadonnas to kick lumps out of each other. The other is a popular game in which two teams of 11 players each chase a ball around a pitch for 90-plus minutes. And yet, for decades the two cultures have been magnetically attracted, like a ball to Leo Messi’s foot, or Fifa bosses to dirty money.
In this country, there existed a group of football fans who can claim to have had as much influence on what the rest of us have worn for the past 40 years as any designer of a fashion label. Casuals — Scallies in Liverpool; Perry Boys in Manchester — were active for around a decade from the late 1970s. Exemplifying the earlier Mod mantra of “clean living under difficult circumstances”, these were obsessive label hounds (hypebeasts avant le lettre) with a preference for then hard-to-find Italian sportswear — Ellesse, Fila, Kappa — as well as for rare
Adidas trainers and upper-crust British brands ripe for subversion — Aquascutum, Pringle, Burberry. Taking the football terrace as their catwalk, they engaged in a fierce battle of sartorial one-upmanship. One week they’d be in Trimm Trabs and a Sergio Tacchini tracksuit; the next Hush Puppies, a golf jumper and a deerstalker hat.
Casuals made their own rules, repurposing professional-class leisurewear as suburban dandyism. One thing no self-respecting casual would ever have been seen dead in: a replica football shirt. Those might be fine for little kids, but the adults who wore them, beer bellies spilling over their jeans, were style-blind wombles, to be pitied or ignored. And a replica shirt of a team you didn’t even support? As a charming man at Loftus Road once said to me, when I asked if he minded awfully not stamping on my ankle again: you fucking what?
Now if only some enterprising young fashionista could get hold of the QPR kit, I predict a streetstyle bonanza for the Super Hoops.
in 1967, george best, then of manchester United, and Mike Summerbee, then of Manchester City, opened a menswear boutique on Motor Street in Manchester. The shop was called Edwardia, and it sold clothes for the “extrovert male”. Best was certainly one of those. He was the first modern footballer, in the sense that he became a brand as much as a player. This was long before football was commercialised and commodified in the way it is today. But, unusually for that time, you didn’t need to follow the game to consume Best. He “transcended the sport”, as they say. Without him, arguably no Cantona, no Beckham — for better and worse the most influential figure in British men’s style of the past 30 years — and no Ronaldo. (And those are just the Man United number 7s who have worked their on-field triumphs, and good looks, into lucrative commercial careers.)
It was Best, and specifically a series of photos of him in his pomp, playing football in the street, looking very handsome and very Mod, that I had in mind when negotiating this issue’s cover shoot with Phil Foden’s representatives. Foden is the Manchester City megastar in the making who, God- and Gareth-willing, will be turning out for England at the World Cup, which kicks off on November 20, in Qatar.*
In September, I was part of the Esquire team that went to Stockport, Foden’s hometown, to meet him and photograph him in this winter’s most fashionable menswear. Foden arrived for the shoot in white high-tops, black jeans, black hoodie and a black Stone Island anorak: a latecasual classic. I wondered how he felt being dressed up in Prada and Celine? Not his usual style, he conceded. But he was game for anything and, unless he was just being polite (a possibility; he’s a very polite young man), he seemed to revel in the opportunity. Interestingly, to me, the moment his eyes lit up was when our stylist, James Sleaford, put him in a chalk-striped suit by Canali, masters of soft, luxurious Italian tailoring. He looked great, I thought. Clearly, Foden thought so too. And not a replica strip in sight.
i am aware that not all esquire readers are football fans. And for those refuseniks we have plenty of good stuff, too. Jem Calder, a distinctive new voice in British fiction, makes his Esquire debut with a short story, “Damaged Goods”. His work was recommended to me by a regular Esquire contributor, Andrew O’Hagan, who opens his cocktail cabinet for our Journal section. Also in Journal, Tabitha Lasley reflects on the joy of being cancelled; Will Self contemplates his shoes; and the sharpest, funniest and most essential newspaper columnist in the country, Marina Hyde of The Guardian, offers a compelling defence of her trade.
Elsewhere, David Thomson celebrates the life and career of Martin Scorsese on the occasion of the 80th birthday of the director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street — and wonders, with typically Thomsonian originality, whether the great filmmaker’s most significant work might be in front of him.
And Tim Lewis sinks his teeth into the latest thing in eating out: normal food, as pioneered at north-London cafe Norman’s. More ironic sophisticates slumming it in working man’s culture, or a refreshing and very necessary corrective to the stifling pretentions of fine dining? Tim’s excellent piece is on page 156.
What he doesn’t mention is that there is a Norman’s football shirt, for the hipster baconbutty consumer who wants to represent for his or her local groovy greasy spoon. It’s by Futsol, priced at £100, and it comes in hot pink or offwhite, with an embroidered olive branch on the chest. I looked online, but both colours are sold out, in every size. Of course they are.
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