What's happening to the striped shirts? How one of the symbols of football aesthetics is changing

In recent years, the football shirt has become a thermometer of the aesthetic trends that populate football. The constant changes, the different designs always communicate something and the latest PUMA AC Milan jersey presented yesterday is synonymous with another stylistic twist. Over the years the vertical stripes on the shirts have undergone a significant evolution, transforming the traditional canons especially of Italian football into new trends that upset the "striped shirts" of the past. AC Milan, Juve and above all Inter Milan have decided to rework historical elements of their shirts making them more modern or even to eliminate them to make room for patterns that are closer to wearability off the pitch.

The trend of the reworked strips went hand in hand with the rise of streetwear where graphics have dominated the aesthetics of the hype for years. In this sense, the fashion industry has driven the football industry towards a reworking of the historical canons that the fans often did not like. Today the imaginative reworkings of the stripes continue - as indicated by the jerseys of the next Serie A season - but the trend reversal could be around the corner: contemporary streetwear has abandoned the colored graphics to return to normcore and it is not certain that football is not ready to do the same.

The stripes have become fickle, malleable depending on the artistic inspirations and service of the club's tastes. Whether they are zigzagging, whether they are almost painted as in the case of Atletico Madrid, whether they are placed in all directions as in the case of United's third shirt, the stripes are changing just like the aesthetics of modern football.

The link with fashion is always open and, considering the 20 months in advance with which the jerseys are designed and drawn, the trends that can be expected are those of a return to traditional stripes, just like the return of normcore on the catwalks has led to the abandonment of graphics. If the new idea of style is to prefer the archive to creativity and innovation, the future of stripes on soccer jerseys will return to the more classic stylistic regimes.