Everyone, their mother and the Prime Minister has a pair of adidas Sambas and has a set of Nike shorts in the drawer — but have we been sleeping on Umbro?
The British brand, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary, is being honoured with a retrospective courtesy of the Westminster Menswear Archive, an impressive collection built up by the fashion department of the University of Westminster. In a large, concrete warehouse-esque space in Marylebone, the brand’s history is regaled on two floors. It starts with its 1924 founding in Wilmslow, Cheshire and traces its early decades, which saw the label focus on sports teams — and how it ensured the champions of the FA Cup were wearing Umbro by dressing each team.
Football jerseys and athletics wear from the 30s, 40s and 50s are displayed in cabinets, before the nineties Britpop wave (and in particular Oasis’s Gallagher brothers in their Umbro Manchester City shirts) saw sportswear cross to leisurewear and, later, fashion — and Umbro was at the forefront.
“It’s about the growth of football as a working-class sport in the urban environment. Its popularity comes at the same time Umbro starts — Wembley stadium had just been built the year before, in 1923, and City’s Maine Road in Manchester had just been completed,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. The latter part of the exhibition — split into five sections: Manchester, England, Replica, Tailored and Diamond, plus a timeline of fashion and Umbro collaborations — recounts how the brand has adapted and forged the path for what we know as streetwear today.
A pioneering moment came in 2002 when, for the World Cup held in Japan, Umbro worked with Paul Smith on the first sportswear and fashion collaboration “pre-dating Yohji Y-3 by about eight months,” says Professor Groves. “They did shirts, luggage, leather goods, jackets and an almost identical sports shirt. That starts about 60 collaborations from then to present day — from Kim Jones to Supreme.”
There’s a rich selection of cult pieces, with highlight garments including the spring/summer 1996 drill top identical to the one worn by Liam Gallagher when Oasis played at Manchester City’s stadium in April 1996, as well as rare collaboration pieces from Philip Treacy, and a Vetements, DHL and Umbro collaboration hoodie from 2018. Professor Groves says he found almost all of the garments on eBay, where “at any one time there are usually 200,000 Umbro garments for sale.”
Nothing will be relisted on the site when the exhibition closes, however. “Everything we have here we collected over the last five years is part of a teaching collection, so when it finishes all our students can study these and use them for inspiration,” Professor Groves says. We can rest easy knowing football shirts won’t be going out of fashion anytime soon.
Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion Exhibition, April 12-28, Ambika P3, NW1, free, fashionexhibitionmaking.arts.ac.uk
