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The market for football jerseys has never been so hot

The Bloke Core and the many contaminations between football and fashion have rapidly increased the interest in game jerseys.

The market for football jerseys has never been so hot The Bloke Core and the many contaminations between football and fashion have rapidly increased the interest in game jerseys.

Football jerseys are experiencing an era of profound evolution, leaving the playing field to become all-round lifestyle items thanks to two very strong trends. The first is the Bloke Core, so defined on TikTok by @brandonlhuntly and already cleared through customs for years in stadiums around the world, where the football jersey is associated with boot cut jeans and low effort sneakers for an effect only apparently casual. The second is the New Normality assumed by the jerseys, now a constant presence in every collection of both streetwear and fashion, which crosses brands and brands that a few years ago were extremely distant from the football aesthetic. An encounter between the fans of the teams and the fan base of the brand that generates an immediate synergy and curiosity between those who can not live without a football jersey to celebrate and those who do not know anything about the most beautiful game in the world. 

This is the result of numerous contaminations of the world of football in the world of fashion, from Demna Gvasalia to Lotta Volkova, which has prompted more and more collaborations between major fashion houses and the most important European clubs. Now they all make garments starting from football jerseys, exploiting the success of a template that opens up an infinite number of combinations and that has an unsurpassed identity charge. We go from bootlegs of iconic jerseys of the 90s as for example a few years ago Patta used to do with Umbro jerseys, to vintage re-editions of adidas x Bape jerseys for the 2018 World Cup, arriving at the latest drops by Palace and Supreme that - significantly - have released in the same week two different interpretations of the game jersey. Brands that have always linked their aesthetics to the skateboarding world have now calibrated their new releases towards a football landscape.

And that shift has also come in the opposite direction, with more and more soccer teams deciding to make their game jerseys with the help of major fashion signatures, immediately making those kits collectible models for fans and hypebeasts alike. Some of them in fact have reached staggering quotations on resell platforms, confirming the trend that sees collaborations between sport and fashion as the new frontier of collecting. The already iconic jersey made for Juventus by the combined forces of adidas and Palace remains one of the first and therefore unobtainable examples of this trend, but also the next designed with Pharrell Williams' Human Race resuming the historic pink color was a great success. The same formula used by adidas also with Arsenal, which later made a game jersey also with 424, the brand of Guillermo Andrade. Not to mention the jersey of Napoli designed by Marcelo Burlon, the meeting of two universes that could only find each other and that has generated a very strong hype. Just as the Paris Saint-Germain jersey designed by Stussy for the opening of the Parisian store of the famous Californian streetwear brand, the consecration of the football jersey as the symbol of an entire city.