Friday, January 21, 2011

Review and Concepts for new France Football Shirt

My concept, no swoosh, vintage crest and red cuffs.
My concept, no swoosh and vintage crest
The official new France kit, why so serious?
I've got a new post up at Worldcupbuzz.com which I repost here:


After France’s embar­rass­ing exit from last summer’s World Cup, their Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion has replaced the man­ager, much of the ros­ter and now their kits. After many years of Adi­das’ wildly-striped designs, new sup­plier Nike has intro­duced a severely sparse shirt. The just-bleu shirt fol­lows a trend toward yes­ter­year led by Umbro, itself a Nike sub­sidiary. Umbro’s recent shirts for Eng­land,WalesMan­ches­ter CitySun­der­land, and Rangers, amongst oth­ers, fea­ture a strong empha­sis on let­ting a club’s pri­mary colours shine and lack the ran­dom pan­els, accented pip­ing and strip­ing endemic to more recent shirt designs. Busy shirts may look fine on the pitch, but tend to look absurd when worn by the man on the street as opposed to sim­pler shirts such as France’s that more resem­ble polo or hen­ley shirts. Except when worn by Katy Perry.

While France’s new shirt is an instant clas­sic that would look nat­ural on such leg­ends as Just Fontaine, the con­trast of the vin­tage shirt design with the thor­oughly mod­ern crest is as jar­ring as an Eric Can­tona press con­fer­ence. So I decided to see how the new shirt would look with­out the dis­tract­ing Nike swoosh, with red cuffs and paired with the vin­tage crest worn by such immor­tals asMichel Pla­tini and Zine­dine Zidane.