Firstly, we must say this: the new Chelsea shirt is not nice. There will be those who disagree, some of them angrily, but remember this: people like Toploader too.
The pattern and the stitching makes it look like a child’s wetsuit. The iridescent crest that “highlights the prestige and glamour of the famous King’s Road in the ’90s” – to read the bumph – looks a bit cheap. The kit that is being nodded to from across the years, Chelsea’s 1997-98 home shirt, is barely identifiable bar the sleeve detail.
Initially, this new Chelsea shirt will be available sponsor-free, presumably to push two windows of sales but also because Chelsea haven’t announced their new sponsor yet.
We spent so long demanding to buy replica shirts without the garish logo on the front that we never stopped to consider what they might look like. On jazzy, busy, detailed designs, it works wonderfully. On a plain design, it looks like just another training shirt that clubs sell to supporters.
Still, the design is barely half the point. This is all about the retro, you understand, and that is enough. “It’s a ’90s thing” is plastered on Chelsea’s online megastore.
The players are posing in the new kit in front of a fake bedroom wall with posters of ’90s music artists. One of those posters is of Atomic Kitten, whose first album wasn’t released until October 2000. An unforgivable error.
Retro kit designs are arriving like a wave. Arsenal had their bruised banana redux in 2019-20, followed by Manchester United’s blue-and-white funkiness in 2021-22 that paid homage to their away shirt in the early 1990s. Both of those succeeded where this Chelsea shirt surely fails: it is the recogniseable designs that you should look to mimic, not an ostensibly plain blue shirt with white under-arms.
This trend was birthed by the rise of football shirts as adult fashion wear in the mid-2000s.
It created a mass market for the sale of second-hand shirts, now a multibillion-pound industry where shirts are worn for their aesthetic design or cult following rather than because you support the club in question. It led to a secondary industry: replica design, or the manufacture of new versions of the old-style shirts. This is where elite football clubs have cashed in.
Chelsea’s store alone sells shirts from 1970, 1978, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1998 and 2000 plus various mash-up versions, all ranging from between £35 and £50.
For supporters, retro shirts provide an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty and bathe in the milky glow of your youth. Wear the new home shirt and everybody knows you love Club X. Wear one from 30 years ago and, even only implicitly, you are proving that you have been here through thick and thin. Where were you when we wore stripes?
The inevitable progression was to merge together the retro love and the present day. It makes sense. Current Premier League shirts now retail at around £70, so the average customer needs disposable income or committed loyalty.
The average age of the Premier League season ticket-holder has crept above 45, which means that they remember the early 1990s as the heyday of their existence. Get your design right to hit them in the solar plexus of their longing for the past, then watch the money roll in.
Because Premier League clubs are rarely shy of mining any rich income stream, we should expect this to continue. Aston Villa with a new home shirt with lace ties on the collar. A Manchester City red-and-black striped away kit. Nottingham Forest in that ludicrous yellow thing with black netting detail.
For football shirts, the 1990s are bigger business now than they were in their own time.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/M2uGLBb
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