Classic football shirts: check your wardrobe for hidden treasure

Football shirts are no longer the preserve of the terraces, much less the boozer on a Saturday afternoon while the footie is on the telly. Colourful vintage strips have become – dare we say it – fashionable. Singer Mabel “recently sported a retro Arsenal 1992-1994 home jersey in Los Angeles… delighting football-shirt spotters like me”, says Felicia Pennant in British Vogue. A K-pop girl band “electrified” the crowd ahead of a match in Seoul and Kim Kardashian was spotted wearing a 1997 Roma shirt last year. Fashion houses have even teamed up with kit makers, giving us Reebok X Botter, for example, plus Umbro with Aries and Palace, and Adidas Arsenal x Labrum.

Smaller, independent fashion labels are going out of their way to source old shirts online, giving them new life as fashionable items of clothing for women. “Shirred football tops and England bandeau-style shirts [have] proved extremely popular for womenswear,” Charlie Oxley and Freddie Rose of Vintage Threads tell Vogue. Their “reworked” football shirts are stocked by Selfridges.

“Part of the appeal [of vintage football shirts], without a doubt, is the streetwear boom,” says Rory Smith in The New York Times. Last year, private equity firm Chernin Group bought a stake in Classic Football Shirts, a retailer with shops in London and Manchester, spying the potential for fashion to do to shirts what it did to trainers. Former US football star Alex Morgan and actor-cum-Wrexham-FC-owner Rob McElhenney have followed suit and now the company is planning its expansion across the Atlantic.

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Why are vintage football shirts so popular?

But vintage football shirts also “root the wearer in a specific era [and] act as a gauge of the depth of their fandom”, says Smith. Every shirt is personal and “each jersey acts as a repository of memory”. Another factor is that, before the 1990s, clubs and kit makers were slow to cotton on to the money that could be made from selling fans their shirts. As a result, many are extremely rare.

“The collectors’ holy grail is Holland ’88,” Tomas Jones, founder of Wrexham-based Vintage Football Shirts, tells Alexander Tyndall in the Financial Times. The bright orange, geometric-patterned tops today fetch around £900. West Germany’s white 1990 World Cup shirt, with its “angular red, black and yellow swoop across the chest”, is also much sought after. Swindon-based Cult Kits sells it for £300 on its website.

Such has been the craze – web searches for “vintage football shirts” rose 5,000% in the past few months globally, notes Vogue – that fakes have begun entering the market. “Always go to a trusted retailer,” warns Josh Warwick of Cult Kits. His firm is careful to authenticate the shirts it sells as genuine.

But not all knock-offs – or “vintage bootlegs”, as Charlie Holder of Brilliant Corner Shop calls them – are bad. In the old days, “designers [were] making guesses” as to what a team’s new kit would look like before its official release, the seller of vintage apparel tells the FT. “The notion of unofficial shirts is really evocative.”

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