World Cup fever isn’t just hitting the football fans, it’s reaching all the way up to luxury fashion houses. Kim Jones from Dior Homme and Virgil Abloh from Off-White have partnered with Nike to unleash their iterations of the beautiful game.
Virgil taps into his youth, simmering its memories from playing hip-hop on the way to high school soccer matches and imbuing that into a new mix of lifestyle and sport branding. Understatement wasn’t part of the brief for this one; the collection is loud and full of nuanced visual cues. To put it simply, the collection is predicated on the visceral.
Hence the “Football, Mon Amour” collection. “The great thing about the vocabulary and history of football is that aesthetically it has its own look. I was always inspired by the way European teams have a sponsor printed over the chest. When I was working on this collection, I wanted to celebrate the different variants of typography,” says Abloh.
The numbering on the jersey refers to Abloh’s player number during his childhood days. Black-and-white checkerboard takes centre stage and gives a nod to the Czech strips. The team’s logo too, pays homage to the creative process of merging familiarity and explanation on the art of striking a ball.
You will have noticed dots all around the pieces of his new collection, and there’s good reason for that. The shoe represents the starting point of the collection, a Flyknit Zoom Fly, tying back to Abloh’s rendition of the Mercurial back then. “I wanted to communicate where a player strikes the ball. So, I put dots on the boot; if you’re going to strike the ball, your foot/eye coordination is basically the only variance of chance. That’s what the collection started with, these running shoes that mimic the same as your actual boot on the pitch so that you started subconsciously training all the time. Then I just applied that aesthetic from the bottom up,” he explains.
Jones takes a different approach on the other end of the spectrum. Recut and reimagined, Jones has taken the traditional garments – the short, jersey and pre-match jacket, and reworked them into new silhouettes that change how the proportions of the body appear. The result appears to by precisely produced by Italian craftsmen, taking inspiration from London punk style of the 70s and 80s and expand the imagination of what it means to wear a uniform.
A nod to the heyday of London’s Kings Road, Jones unifies avant garde tailoring with sport tech, resulting in clothes that don’t look like any other. “That whole punk era was all about proportions that gave power to the wearer. I was inspired by the idea of DIY of the time — cutting up and putting things back together — to create something new,” says Jones.
That whole idea too translates into the design and formation of another highlight of the collection: the shoes. A second glance is needed to spot all the details of of his favourite sneakers. “I was looking at the silhouette of the Mercurial along with my three favorite Nike shoes: The Footscape, the Vandal and the Air Max 97. Combining these into one shoe is an homage to punk, but with a super-slick end product,” he says.
The ‘Football Re Imagined’ collection will be released first on the 7th of June, where as the ‘Football, Mon Amour’ will release next 2 weeks after, on the 14th of June, both at Nike’s online store and at Dover Street Market Singapore. Is this the new direction that high fashion is taking?
