Voice of London

All around the country, there’s a fashion revolution taking place. You might absolutely hate football but take one look through your wardrobe and you’ll see that your fashion has been influenced by the beautiful game.

You may not own any football shirts but a common trend in the fashion world at the moment is using the templates of football shirts. Major high street brands like Urban Outfitters stock plenty of these kinds of T-shirts. To you, they may just be a pretty nice shirt, but to football fans, it’s easy to see the influence.

We decided to see if members of the public would therefore wear football shirts when out socialising with friends. Most said no, but the common theme was that there is a bit of a trend growing around sportswear. This was echoed by Classic Football Shirts production specialist Rory. He said “You go into a lot of vintage shops around the area and they’re actually selling templates of football shirts. What difference does a badge really make?”

It’s nice to see that my favourite item of clothing is making its way onto the high-street but maybe that’s not enough. We therefore went to visit the best place to look through a huge selection of retro football shirts: Classic Football Shirts London store in Brick Lane.

Rory spent a year in Manchester listing and valuing product after product for the Classic Football Shirts website. It’s fair to say he’s a bit of an expert when it comes to retro football shirts. But, he’s not got sick of them. For him, it’s all about the nostalgia they bring. “A lot of the time we get people coming into the shop and talking about how dull and bland and templated a lot of the shirts are nowadays. Obviously, there’s a history behind everything we have in the shop. There’s a lot of harking back to the day when football was a lot less commercialised.”

Check out the video to see what Rory, some members of the public and yours truly had to say in full.

Words: Samuel Carter | Video: Samuel Carter and Harry Lye | Music: https://www.bensound.com/