How Italian football clubs became world leaders in high-fashion drip
Don’t be surprised if you ever see Drake rocking a Venezia shirt
UPDATE: It actually happened! The standfirst above was originally a throwaway joke about Drake biting every style and subculture that he thinks is cool; and now (12/8/24), not two months after I wrote this blog, the man himself was confirmed by multiple outlets as an investor in Venezia FC. Madness.
A couple of years ago, my wider group of friends and I participated in a sort of lucky dip, a Secret Santa-adjacent game to coincide with an informal university reunion. Football plays a fairly big part in our socializing, and perhaps 10-12 of us agreed to buy each other football shirts as gifts. There were a few caveats: kits couldn’t be for clubs who played in England or Scotland (you’re having a stroke if you think I’m going to walk around in Rangers or Celtic gear, even in London), or for other European countries (likewise for the French or German national teams – that’s not happening). Beyond that, though, there were no rules, other than “make it as jazzy as you can”.
I ended up with a vintage Algeria kit from the 1980s, which I was pretty happy with. In fact, the whole endeavour ended up going pretty well. Here’s a quick selection of some of the shirts that were given and received:
Cool, huh?
Anyway, the point is that by the time of our shirt exchange, football shirts had long since become more than simple displays of allegiance to a club. They are still that, of course, and you’ll see any number of them at festivals throughout the UK every summer – young Leeds fans, in my experience, really seem to like pop punk, while St Albans fans are (predictably) big fans of post-hardcore… – but clubs and countries, and even different kits within those teams, now also act as signifiers of different values.
If you don’t follow me, consider the following. You’d assume that there’s little diversity within national kits, but anyone who follows English football will know the vibe difference between a bloke who wears this shirt:
And a lad who wears this one:
Let me explain. The first shirt is for the normies. The guy in that white England kit (it’s from 2022) is probably in his late 30s or early 40s. You might see him at Wembley with his kids, probably wearing shorts and flip-slops or a pair of New Balance, and he likes nothing more than a Carling while watching the game; he’s probably not from London. He listens to Kasabian and Royal Blood. Whereas the second shirt – that famous blue 1990 third kit that so immediately calls to mind “World in Motion” – is also for normies, but normies who think they’re a bit different. The lad in that shirt has an earring and/or a bucket hat, possibly snorts coke before an England game and was almost definitely born after 1990. He might read The Athletic or Zonal Marking, if he went to private school. He thinks he’s a football hipster. Most importantly, his 1990 shirt was made last year in a Vietnamese sweatshop; he has bought it off a vintage shirt ecommerce website especially to channel the vibe of the 90s.
So. If you’re someone for whom being a socialist is a big part of your identity, you might wear the kit of a fan-owned club like Hamburg’s St Pauli. If you hate the Premier League on principle or are particularly enamoured of grassroots clubs, you might buy a shirt from Dulwich Hamlet or Clapton CFC. If you’re a huge prick, you’ll enjoy wearing a Real Madrid shirt. And so on. Point being, all of these colourful shirts carry different meaning just as much as brands like Primark or Versace might.
And no one has clocked on to this better than Italian football clubs.
Recent years have seen an influx of absolutely beautiful kits – more collector’s items than anything you would ever actually wear in five-a-side – from Serie B and smaller Serie A clubs, spearheaded by the likes of Venezia FC and FC Como 1907. In 2021, Venezia, a tiny club from the Veneto, made a splash (pardon the pun) when they returned to the top tier of Italian football, and promptly unveiled one of the most stunningly, achingly, painfully cool kits ever.
Look at it; drink it in. It looks like something out of a hip-hop video, more like a leather handbag than a football kit. There’s no sponsor to ruin the look.1 There’s just a marble-effect black design, sprinkled with golden stars (they’re in the shape of a V, which is hard to see because the model’s sitting down in the photo above) and trimmed in the city’s colours of green and orange. It’s the football kit the blind Doge Enrico Dandolo would have worn to sack Constantinople.
And, in case you hadn’t noticed, just look who they got to model it. That terrifyingly stern, grey-eyed, centre-parted Italian model, wearing the strip with earrings over a collared shirt, is not a football player, believe it or not. Gone are the days where your new home kit would be unveiled by your aging club captain or a callow youth-team product. If ever there was a way to announce that a club was as much a lifestyle brand as a sports team, this was it.
Venezia were shit, and promptly got relegated, but it didn’t matter. They had the world’s attention (Goal.com called them “the world’s coolest club”) and went on to release several more eye-catching kits the next season. Obviously, they shot them on gondolas.
And then there was Como 1907. Como’s profile was raised when 35-year-old ex-Chelsea, Arsenal and Barcelona midfielder Cesc Fàbregas moved there in 2022 from AS Monaco (Monaco then Lake Como. Well played, Cesc). Like Venezia, they were promoted from the second tier this summer and will play in Serie A from next season. Like Venezia, their kit is pretty self-consciously “drip”-oriented.
I like this as lot. I think it looks like a swimming pool shimmering under the sun (or indeed a lake, perhaps..?). There is a sponsor here, and the kit is not as deliberately high fashion as Venezia’s stuff, but the white and blue of the sunfish MOLA logo blends in, at least. And look where they’ve shot those players for the kit launch – not on a training ground, not in a studio, but in a white marble room that looks like the inside of one of those mad neoclassical buildings which Mussolini’s fascists favoured in the 1920s. It’s cool.
So why Italy? Well, it’s already infused with the cultural associations and semiotics of high fashion – Rome and Milan are seen (rightly) as much classier, design-led cities than Stoke or Newcastle (sorry, but it’s true). It’s obvious why Como, as in Lake Como, is a cool place to reference in your football drip, isn’t it? Or why Venice’s kit might be seen as a work of art worthy of sitting alongside Veroneses and Titians and Tintorettos (Tintoretti?).
And Italian football has always had the sort of outsider status that made it alluring to weirdos and hipsters, anyway. It’s historically slower, there’s traditionally been less money in it outside of the very biggest clubs like Juve, and the fan culture feels closer to the madness of the Balkans than the safetyism of English or Spanish football. Sometimes the design can get literally militaristic; Napoli, that most insurgent of Italian teams, have had two camo-motif away kits since 2013.
Italian clubs spend a lot of money, but they also tend to sell a lot of players. According to the CIES Football Observatory, between 2013-2022, four of the ten clubs in Europe’s Big Five leagues to have made the biggest net profit on transfers were Italian (four more were from the so-called French “league”, with one each from Germany and Spain). Aside from Juventus, they don’t really have the spending power or ability to eat a financial loss in the way that, say, English clubs do. For smaller clubs, shirt sales are a sort of asymmetrical warfare: they can make a huge amount of money from them, disproportionate to their smaller fanbases.
Even the big clubs seem to have got in on the action in recent years. Here, from left to right, are Inter Milan, AC Milan and Fiorentina’s home, third and away kits respectively for the 2023/4 season, plus a limited edition all-black Milan shirt inspired by the cathedral which I would kill several umarells to own:
Yep. That’s a ninja turtle on Inter’s shirt. They don’t always get it right, okay?
It’s hard, I would imagine, to design something cool when it then has to have CAZOO or QATAR AIRWAYS blazoned over it.