In recent years, the urban arbiters of style on the streets of the French capital have taken Paris Saint-Germain’s football kit to their hearts.
In the banlieues on the outskirts of the city where the club scouts for playing talent, youth from Algerian, Moroccan, Congolese, Senegalese and Cameroonian backgrounds have made the PSG brand their own.
They may well support the team, but their choice of PSG apparel is as much about fashion as it is about sport.
PSG’s brand has also found a home on the streets of London, New York and Tokyo, exemplifying how football apparel is morphing from fanwear to streetwear and rivalling basketball as the dominant sport-fashion crossover on the global stage.
Fabien Allegre, chief brand officer at Paris Saint-Germain, is arguably at the top of his game after 16 years in the position. He thinks that basketball is still ahead in terms of its influence on streetwear but believes football – especially PSG – is catching up.
“NBA jerseys have deep ties with hip-hop culture, which is and was the dominant force in American fashion and music,” Allegre says. “In the 90s and 2000s, rappers and other music artists frequently wore NBA jerseys, making them an assemblage of street style and urban identity – and those jerseys became cool, not just because they were sportswear, but because they represent a fusion of sport, music and culture.
“I won’t talk about others [football clubs], but for Paris Saint-Germain we were the first club to bridge the gap between fashion and sport. I strongly believe in the fact that sport is not aside of the culture, it’s a part of the culture […] and people not only relate to PSG as a football club, but also as maybe the coolest brand in the sport ecosystem.”
Allegre spoke to The Long Game as PSG launched a pale pink third kit in collaboration with the British rapper Central Cee, unveiled in competition at a home match attended by celebrities such as Miami Heat player Jimmy Butler and rapper Cardi B.
The Central Cee shirt is the latest in a series of PSG’s culture collaborations, which have taken off since Nike attached its Jordan brand to the PSG shirt in a three-year exclusive collaboration in 2018.
The partnership has continued as Jordan’s only football collaboration three years after the exclusivity provision expired because, Allegre believes, Nike can’t be “100% sure” there will be such a good fit with any other football club.
This success, he added, allowed the club to press ahead with further collaborations with non-sports brands, showing “the power of collaborating with brands, designers and artists outside of the football field to create crossover appeal.”
All of which suggests that PSG has the power to create culturally relevant streetwear through creative partnership and marketing. But Allegre acknowledges it’s not the club driving the trend – it is young people creating the trend in response to PSG’s creations.
“We are the club of the ‘new generation’ so our duty is really to try to understand their code. We’ve been doing a lot of surveys, listening to a lot of cool kids not only in Paris, just to try to understand their code. Of course, the brand is setting the tone. But the reality is you’re only good if your sales are good.”
A thousand flowers bloom
In Paris, it’s not only PSG. Retailers are now selling San Antonio Spurs jerseys as streetwear because of the NBA club’s French star Victor Wembanyama, while Arsenal shirts, retro or otherwise, are popular because of the French contribution to the ‘Invincibles’ team that won the 2003-04 English Premier League undefeated.
Go to any European capital and there is now an array football-related streetwear on display with young Londoners as likely to parade in Inter Miami pink as they are to wear Chelsea, Spurs or Arsenal on a non-match day.
The continued demand for retro football shirts is also driving the organic rise of football shirts as streetwear. But like basketball after the 90s and like PSG today, it’s been given rocket fuel by branding and marketing experts at the clubs, working with community influencers and celebrities.
Premier League club Crystal Palace has appointed a counterpart to Allegre, and other clubs are learning fast.
The South London club’s ‘creative lead’ Kenny Annan-Jonathan does not yet have a say in replica kit designs – as Allegre does with Nike – but has created a signature club range that reflects the communities that live around the Crystal Palace and Croydon areas.
“I think this space is beautiful, and why I actually love this space is because there’s no one right answer,” Annan-Jonathan says of working at the intersection of football and fashion. “Every micro-community has their own culture, so how do you tie them together to make something much bigger? It’s become a really big cultural movement, especially in the UK where, traditionally, there’s been a younger, more creative demographic that has always existed but never been part of the conversation… and only now are they starting to bubble to the forefront.”
Aside from his own work, Annan-Jonathan references Arsenal’s 2024-25 away shirt, created by his designer friend ‘Labrum’. The shirt, which celebrates pan-African identities and art, has been an immediate streetwear hit around the world and represents Arsenal’s latest move into making apparel that is equally at home on the pitch and on the street.
Second and third strips, in particular, have become a platform for storytelling and design experimentation, analogous to the ‘City Edition’ NBA jerseys created by Nike that celebrate city achievements and culture.
Along with Arsenal’s Africa-inspired second strip, Ajax Amsterdam launched a Bob Marley-themed third strip in the 2021-22 season, celebrating the reggae star’s song ‘Three Little Birds’, which was adopted by fans as an unofficial anthem in the 2000s.
At national team level, the Belgian FA’s kit supplier Adidas created a second strip for the Euro 2024 tournament based on the attire of Belgian comic book hero TinTin.
All these strips have outperformed more conventional variations in terms of sales, hinting at the appetite for more creative streetwear options beyond the standard retro fare.
In the pink
Basketball and football may be vying for dominance on the street, but there’s also plenty of cross-pollination.
Becky Kimbro, senior vice president of brand engagement at the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, says that the Texas-based team was one of the first in the NBA to introduce off-beat colourways, such as fuchsia pink, in the early 1990s.
“The iconic early-90s Spurs, with [fuchsia] pink, orange and teal colours were one of the first in US sport to use that sort of bright neon colour palette,” Kimbro tells The Long Game. “It’s something that still resonates with fans today. We still have these ‘Fiesta’ colours incorporated into a lot of our merchandise and our retail.”
Like the Central Cee shirt, the integration of pink into sports apparel and similarly, camouflage-patterned shirts, creates instant crossover appeal. Canadian rapper Drake, himself a collaborator in NBA jersey design with his hometown Toronto Raptors, made a splash in 2016 when he wore pink Juventus away shirt – a hit among hip hop artists that loved the combination of the soccer, salmon pink and the club’s then-sponsor, Jeep.
Germany’s pink away strip for Euro 2024 become the fastest-selling away shirt in the national team’s history and was especially popular with women. And while pink was chosen to lead the brand palette at Inter Miami, the club are having it both ways by launching a third strip and wider fashion collection in the aqua blue associated with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. The collaboration with Adidas is described as “tapping on 80s nostalgia”, proving that even a club founded in 2018 can make retro trends work for them.
Shirt as medium
The streetwear trend in football is now so ingrained in fashion culture – and so commercialised – that London art gallery OOF initially decided against a football shirt-related exhibition this year. The curators worried that it would be seen as a fashion exhibition, rather than art.
Curator and gallery co-founder Justin Hammond, explains: “Football tops were suddenly everywhere. They’d become part of mainstream culture and every fashion brand was jumping on the bandwagon […] but by approaching it from a purely art perspective and focusing as much as possible on totally unique artist-made shirts, we presented a story that hadn’t been told before.”
The ‘Tops Off: A Century of Football Street Art’ exhibition embraced the creativity that can be attached to football jerseys as a medium and perhaps points to the future of streetwear.
It included an Italian football club, AG Velsaga, which started off as an art collective playing in the lowest tier of Italian football, where everything is informed by designs inspired by artists. They sell more shirts than a club of their size would normally do, while pursuing an ‘anything goes’ design policy.
One shirt showing the adidas trefoil logo dripping in blood might well have attracted a lawsuit from the sporting goods company had the club been more high-profile.
Equally, a Paris Nord-based women’s team – the provocatively-named Cacahuètes Sluts – play in strips that have more in common with graffiti painting than sporting apparel.
Meanwhile, the show’s artist-in-residence Christian Jeffrey created France and England national kits out of florid, traditional fabrics with hand-painted logos and badges on.
“The ones that we put up on our Instagram, everyone was like ‘How do I get one’ until they realise it’s art, and we explained the prices,” Hammond said.
Allegre, who has seen plenty of trends come and go, believes there is a secret for any club aiming to break into the streetwear market.
“I strongly believe in the concept that one plus one can equal three. But to do that you need to respect authenticity and cultural credibility whatever the collaboration.
“In our capacity with Nike, for example, we make a new kit every year while using the club DNA, like the red and blue strips. But just look at the different jerseys we’ve been doing for the last five years. It’s all about authenticity and our capacity to think out of the box.”
