From Sportswear to Leisurewear: The Evolution of English Football League Shirt Design in the Replica Kit Era

The football shirt is of iconic significance, defining a club's visual identity through its role as sporting uniform and fan identifier, providing a canvas for commercial interactions and increasingly acting as the focus of nostalgia and collector culture. In this article we focus on the football shirt's extension from sportswear to a replica product worn as cross-generational leisurewear. We first consider how a replica's authenticity, its principal attribute, exists in objective, constructive and existential contexts. We then demonstrate how the subsequent focus of kit manufacturers and clubs on satisfying these differing interpretations of authenticity has influenced football shirt design. For two decades, replica kits were marketed as sportswear to children, with attempts to enhance the football shirt's authenticity through distinctiveness and exclusivity leading to copyrighted designs, manufacturer's logos and increased patterning. However, as the replica football shirt became adult leisurewear, the changing customer base led to retrospective and recycled shirt designs proclaiming a club's distinct identity through its heritage, fulfilling fans' nostalgic interpretations of a club's authentic kit, and reflecting fans' use of replica shirts to display their authenticity as a genuine fan. These ideals have also inspired a parallel retro-replica industry and, we argue, caused stagnation in the development of the aesthetic elements of contemporary kit design, which had previously demonstrated innovation interspersed with periods of consolidation, but had taken few retrospective turns. Genuine innovation in football shirt design has increasingly become restricted to technological advances and marketing strategies.     

Given the Boot: Reading the Ambiguities of British and Continental Football Boot Design

The robust design of the mass-produced British football boot from the late nineteenth century onwards appeared to evolve rather slowly compared with subsequent lightweight, flexible ‘continental’ fabrication. However, with careful reading we can identify considerable overlap and influence between manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Boot and shoe manufacturing was an intensely competitive industry and it was in the interests of entrepreneurs to pioneer advances in order to promote a particular brand. In developing football boots for the mass market this may have included much pseudo-science but even small innovations sought to improve performance and market share. Design ambiguities were also inherent because footwear manufacturers routinely borrowed and appropriated successful design elements for their own products. With more choice and consumer demand, football boots became increasingly less adapted from other outdoor footwear owned by the participant, to specialised models manufactured as part of the flourishing sporting goods industry. The internationalisation of the mass market for football boots is here explored though the distinct but related case studies of two family firms; Manfield from Northamptonshire, England and Adidas from Herzogenaurach, Germany. Arguing that there was much continuity between the designs and manufacturing processes of the two firms, the article explores how the design of the football boot became increasingly influenced by the fashion industry as items of conspicuous consumption. By 1954 the launch of the training shoe saw sportswear become a style trend worn on the street, rather than on the pitch. This in turn, influenced football boot design as both a highly technical item of elite sportswear and an expensive, aspirational essential in an everyday kitbag.