There seems to be a trend very recently for the major manufacturers to try to reimagine great moments in football kit design's history for their own greedy ends. In some cases this can be advantageous for design fans, in others it is an insult to a great moment in the kit timeline.
Re-releases or reissues, with slight identifying features, are nothing new. The Barça centenary shirt has just had its second re-release, Bergkamp's Netherlands shirt from the 1998 World Cup was revisited and both Liverpool and Olympique de Marseille's 1989-91 shirts were tackled relatively faithfully. In each case I would sooner have an original to an Original, but they weren't bad. Particularly, Nike's takes were barely distinguishable, save for details on the inside. Some shirts are worth re-releasing, and Umbro got in on the act with England - the reissues handily bearing a closer resemblance to player issue shirts of the time - and a nice representation, in pristine form, is worth our hard-earned cash.
At the other end of the scale, as well as modern playing wear being influenced by great kits of the past, adidas Originals has created items which take inspiration from twenty or thirty-year-old designs, but are wholly new products - albeit 80s or 90s stylised. This kind of bleeding of a classic highlight - such as with the Netherlands '88 shirt pattern appearing on everything from orange track tops to Stars Wars football shirts (!) - leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and confuses some, but is forgivable.
The risk, though, of misleading our descendents is high. When, in 200 years' time, a Sir Tony Robinson equivalent unearths a Holland '88-styled track top he will be sure to class it as a relic of that European Championship victory, rather than a cynical money-making release of twenty years later. That's inevitable, but mistakes get made. However, when shirts of the past are modernised, to fit in with "a story" or "a message" with the "collection consistency" and "brand awareness" paramount, things have gone too far.
Nike have begun putting together supposedly classic Barcelona shirts, referencing a time before Nike was even producing football kits - certainly of any note - and including their own retro or contemporaneous branding. This is too much. The suggestion that we should look back on the days of Johan Cruyff and newly imagine him controlling the ball on his Swoosh-laden chest is offensive.
But it's not just Nike. In one of the most frustrating moves from the manufacturer I've ever seen, adidas have reissued the Olympique de Marseille 1993 Champions League Final (winning) shirt, sponsorless (points for that, granted) but without the adidas Equipment logo, which is replaced by the adidas Originals Trefoil, and the crest is the modern version, which was not even an apple in the eye of its creator twenty years ago. This has been done to shoehorn a post-Trefoil era release into the Originals range, whilst keeping with the modern brand identity, because it suits the marketing arm of the company that way, regardless of the desecration of l'OM's finest hour.
So is this the future? Don't get me wrong, I want to see football kits influenced by those of the past. Those early 90s designs are due a comeback, and it's a comeback that will never materialise due to tighter restrictions on manufacturer branding (i.e. Three huge stripes on the shoulder/chest just isn't cool with Uefa anymore) so the leisure/sportswear market has to provide an outlet. But to put together a shirt of that type, that in the l'OM case acts as the only nominal version of that specific shirt that has ever been released - the regular season one had a sponsor and a different crest - is an abuse of power.
Even Warrior are at it, though in their case the retro shirts laughably branded with an ill-fitting Warrior logo act as a much lesser evil than the modern playing and training wear. And whilst the likes of Toffs and Score Draw can provide relatively accurate representations of pre-commercialisation boom kits - though the former has a nasty habit of toning down the more outrageous collars from times of yore - when they dip into the 80s, 90s and 00s, the then required rewriting - or erasing - can compromise the overall package. That's not to say they don't provide a service, in offering products which we'd otherwise have no chance of ever getting our hands on.
But generally we have places we can go to get designs from twenty odd years ago, that we know are what was actually retailed at the time, if a little frayed around the edges. For those wishing to dip into the archives, with great power comes great responsibility. Use history, take inspiration from it, but don't rewrite it in commercial approximations.
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