The Good, The Bad The WTF

Including today, there are three Wednesdays between now and the World Cup. What better time to start a miniseries, then, of the shirts of the USA’s group mates in the tournament? NO BETTER TIME!

Sadly, I am rather unprepared for the next two weeks. I have all of 18 years of Slovenian history to work with, and Algeria probably just used cookie-cutter adidas kits back through their history. Perhaps I’ll just use that nasty African Unity kit for them instead. But, no fear for today as England are simply chock-full of history.

History and white shirts. And not much else. Sure, there are years where sublimation was overused, and some powder blue monstrosities out there. But that’s not what we are going with this week. Nope, we’re going back in time to the early ’80s when the home and away shirts matched each other. Said shirts are remembered fondly today by England followers as iconic and lovely. Iconic they may be, but if Umbro tried to pass these off today, they’d be sold off to some American company post haste.

Wait, what? Well, you get my point.

Too many stripes, and none are the same size. Maybe if you could convince me that Admiral was using the Golden Ratio or something along those lines, I might be swayed. For now, though, I’m not. The best part of the shoulder stripes–besides possibly being a design idea stolen from American Football (“Let’s highlight the lads strapping shoulders; and give them pads, too!”)–is the fact that, in this shirt at least, the two blue stripes don’t match. I’m willing to put that down to age, but it is rather off-putting.

You know what else doesn’t match? The blue used in the striping around the cuffs and collar. Whereas the blue in the shirt is more Royal in color, the blue in these stripes looks more Navy. Whoops.

And then, there’s this:

That’s, um, bright. This shirt does bring to light two things from the home version. One, the blue stripes up top may indeed be the same color. Two, neither one of them matches the blue in the V-neck or sleeves.

I think the thing that bother me most about this shirt and it’s terirble shoulder stripes is the fact that, one some level, the top half of the shirt approximates the Admiral logo. Look at it. Once you go above the England badge, you have stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe, head, which is very close to the stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe, circle logo. That’s just speculation, of course, but if you can convince me that someone at Admiral did indeed think to substitute in Bryan Robson’s head for the circle of the Admiral logo, then this is, in fact, genius.

Otherwise, it’s just plain ugly. Not as ugly as this ill-advised reboot (maybe that’s why they got sold?), or this one from the early ’90s blue period, or even this one, as worn by David Seaman. But none of those are considered classics, and these two up top are. English fashion sense–the English food of Europe.