How virtual concept kits are influencing jersey design We talked about it with Sett Pace and three other designers linked to the virtual kit subculture
Watching the releases of the upcoming football season, many fans and followers have had a strange feeling of Matrix-like deja vu. Most of the most innovative designs like Inter’s snakeskin home or Barcelona’s iridescent away seem to have come straight out of an IG feed of the so-called concept kits designers. "For those who come from the world of amateur kit design, Inter, Barcelona and Spurs shirts are all things we have seen before," as Alberto Mariani aka Rupertgraphic, one of the Italian exponents of this strange and increasingly influential creative movement, pointed out. For those who are not familiar with the term, concept kits are amateur proposals created by designers out of passion and then published on social platforms. Few years ago they were a small group of football shirt enthusiasts that were throwing visionary virtual shirt online, today - due to social media, the explosion of online gaming and the football-fashion trend - this little niche has bubbled into the mainstream influencing the of a huge industry like football, in a strange reversal of imitation between reality and virtual.
After years of basic templates, revamps of old shirts and minimal variations in fit and colourway, innovation in the market is coming from amateur graphic designers who were outside or on the fringes of the industry and have managed to exploit the avenue opened up by the football-fashion trend, surfing the growth of gaming and general interest in football shirts. Instagram played an important role, where a large proportion (if not the majority) of Manchester United's 42 million followers became attached to the team by playing FIFA or PES, thus admiring the virtual jerseys much more than the real ones. This segment of the population raised on bread and video games is the same one that experienced the streetwear boom, which especially in Asia but also in America means logomania. These two macro processes have created the perfect scenario for concept kits on Instagram: when an unknown graphic designer posted a concept of a fancy PSG x Louis Vuitton kit on his feed, it was easy to trigger social discussions: it is divisive content, attracting masses of fans ready to despise the fancy kit and just as many users ready to tag the psg to ask if it is a fake. Most likely, the trend of fake collaborations that reached its peak in 2018, inspired the one between Palace, adidas and Juventus, arriving then to the declared inspiration as in the cases of Marcelo Burlon x Napoli and especially Brain-Dead x AS Roma, where the operation reads the real-virtual short-circuit in an ironic way.
Many of these graphic designers are aware of these mechanisms and the progressive accessibility of virtual customisation programmes - one example above all is the Virtual Kit - has attracted more and more young people and non-professionals. Not only fans and enthusiasts are looking at the concept kits, but also brand and club insiders, as confirmed by Marco Dal Bon, better known as Emmegraphic, "it hasn't gone unnoticed by insiders, who have inevitably been influenced by the increasingly exotic and elaborate designs that have populated the various social networks to the point of almost wanting to reflect what the community has enhanced directly on the playing fields, riding the wave".
When Andrea Agnelli presented the Superleague, he said that "Fortnite is our competitor", and there is some truth in what he says. The mistake lies in thinking of engaging in a battle between real and virtual, while instead it is possible to synthesize them by giving a materiality to what is composed of algorithms and graphics. As Jaime Canas aka SOCCEPT said, "concept kits were born to break the mainstream, over the years they have shown that you can really innovate a football shirt".
