Foot­ball made a big step from sta­di­um stands into pop­u­lar cul­ture in Great Britain in the 1980s. At that time, Eng­lish fans had the worst rep­u­ta­tion in all of Europe — they were fero­cious, cru­el and uncon­trol­lable, leav­ing destruc­tion in their wake and spread­ing fear across a calm con­ti­nent. The suc­cess of British clubs in Euro­pean com­pe­ti­tions only increased the num­ber of fans of Liv­er­pool, Tot­ten­ham, Not­ting­ham For­est and Aston Vil­la, and away match­es always result­ed in pogroms and loss­es for the city author­i­ties.

Sud­den­ly, in the ear­ly 1980s, an intel­li­gent wing broke away from the fan move­ment. The “casu­al” sub­cul­ture appeared pre­cise­ly under the influ­ence of a neg­a­tive hooli­gan image. It became more dif­fi­cult for active fans to go to pubs and crowd­ed places, as the police imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fied them by the scarves and T‑shirts of their favorite clubs.

Fans quick­ly real­ized that it was bet­ter not to attract unnec­es­sary atten­tion, and wore items from expen­sive brands. This was a move away from long hair to a more stan­dard fash­ion. Now casu­als could be iden­ti­fied in the crowd not by the ros­es of Liv­er­pool or Man­ches­ter Unit­ed, but by typ­i­cal fash­ion hous­es — Stone Island, Lacoste, Ser­gio Tac­chi­ni and FILA. “Stone Island” became a leg­end for rad­i­cal fans. After the Eng­land team’s depar­ture from the 1992 Euro­pean Cham­pi­onship in Swe­den, the Three Lions fans did not destroy stalls and scare passers-by. They hit up the local Genius cloth­ing bou­tique and picked up a bunch of Stone Island items.

Foot­ball, in prin­ci­ple, removed the stig­ma from fash­ion, since in a patri­ar­chal soci­ety fash­ion is con­sid­ered pre­dom­i­nant­ly a female activ­i­ty. The addi­tion of scarves and logos of famous teams to the image slight­ly smoothed out the mis­trust of men, and pop cul­ture worked to roman­ti­cize the image of bru­tal sta­di­um vis­i­tors. In par­tic­u­lar, the film “Green Street Hooli­gans” is a cult film among fans (but not only among them) – where bright young guys styl­ish­ly wore things from Stone Island, loved foot­ball and devot­ed­ly fought for ideals.

Foot­ball clubs are now using fash­ion to expand their audi­ence. Sports have final­ly turned into show busi­ness, and top teams are will­ing to col­lab­o­rate with fash­ion brands. For exam­ple, PSG signed con­tracts with Air Jor­dan and KOCHE, and a lim­it­ed col­lec­tion of Arse­nal kits was designed by Stel­la McCart­ney. This is done to tell about the cool­ness of foot­ball to those who were not inter­est­ed in it before.

Sim­i­lar cas­es can be found in Rus­sia. For exam­ple, in 2019, Zen­it col­lab­o­rat­ed with the uncon­ven­tion­al Dutch brand Suit­sup­ply, where a clas­sic jack­et was com­bined with a hood­ed hood­ie. And now the Russ­ian Pre­mier League togeth­er with Win­line have launched a lim­it­ed-edi­tion cap­sule col­lec­tion from design­er Tigran Avetisyan, whose port­fo­lio already includes Nike and Comme des Garçons. “Foot­ball brings peo­ple togeth­er around the world, just like fash­ion does. Both areas are impor­tant cul­tur­al parts of life. With this col­lec­tion, I want­ed to build a bridge between them and show this con­nec­tion,” said Tigran.

The col­lab­o­ra­tion between RPL and Avetisyan includes five items of cloth­ing — jer­sey, trousers, base­ball caps, sweat­shirts with a hood and sports jack­ets. The design­er will pro­duce only 12 bombers, each will be assigned a ser­i­al num­ber, and bomber No. 1 will be award­ed to the best foot­ball play­er of the 2022/23 Pre­mier League — the Brazil­ian winger of Zen­it Mal­colm.

“One of the goals of the RPL strat­e­gy is to expand the audi­ence that is begin­ning to get involved in foot­ball. To do this, we need to go with our brand into areas that are new to us. Fash­ion is one of them. How­ev­er, it is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for the League to imple­ment such projects alone. We live in an era of col­lab­o­ra­tion, when com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent areas find com­mon ground and eas­i­ly inter­act with each oth­er to bring some­thing fresh to the world. This is quite con­sis­tent with the glob­al trend,” — Anton Feti­sov, direc­tor of the RPL mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions depart­ment, is con­fi­dent.

Foot­ball was the main trend of 2022: block­core, a com­bi­na­tion of vin­tage uni­forms with clas­sic trousers or jeans, migrat­ed from the British streets to Tik­Tok rec­om­men­da­tions. In Feb­ru­ary 2023, adi­das released a new col­lec­tion for zoomers, made in the tra­di­tion of sports chic and block­core, and Wednes­day star Jen­na Orte­ga became the glob­al ambas­sador.

The post­mod­ern world is built on ref­er­ences, rein­ter­pre­ta­tions and nods. Fash­ion, as an impor­tant reflec­tion of this world, is also mov­ing in a spi­ral, and now the glob­al fash­ion indus­try is head­ing towards the style of British fans of the 1980s. Foot­ball, in a sense, has con­quered every­one: what was once con­sid­ered the cloth­ing of the mar­gin­al­ized, after 40 years has turned into the main trend of influ­encers around the world.