When Lonsdale made football jerseys - From boxing to football, the story of the London brand that has now disappeared from the playing fields

The latest fashion weeks in Milan and Paris have officially brought the '00s style back onto the fashion scene, a trend that with the hashtags #Y2kAesthetic and #Y2kFashion has reached over 500 million views on TikTok and also on depop "Y2K" has become a popular hashtag among the youngest. An ugly-glam style that perhaps in England - where at the time Robbie Williams' BritPop and David and Victoria Beckham's outfits dominated the scene - has found its highest expression and has created strange and interesting aesthetic short-circuits between English brands and Premier League shirts. Among these, Lonsdale's brief excursion into the world of British football best describes the kind of brit-working class aesthetics where a popular, box-born brand became the sponsor of provincial, bad-ass clubs that would soon - like Lonsdale - be swept up in the Premier's globalist turn.

The clubs in question - Sunderland, Birmingham City, Brentford, Swindon Town, Millwall, and Blackburn Rovers - were not part of the elite of English football, but they fitted in perfectly with the brand's aesthetic. Lonsdale wasn't the kind of glossy, glitzy brand that could sponsor Manchester United's great champions. Rather, it focused on small-town teams and players who were halfway between success and oblivion. A prime example of this is Craig Bellamy, capable of scoring in every Premier League stadium but at the same time being the protagonist of clamorous and very serious legal affairs, from which any brand today would keep its distance.

Before the extra-football events, Lonsdale was one of the few English brands to be a protagonist in the Premier League. Its sponsorships, however, in most cases only lasted for two seasons, also because the designs proposed never really presented anything particularly innovative, unlike the garments proposed capable of monopolising the entire sector. His last appearance in football and in the Premier League will be with Millwall in the season, leaving the world of football for good with the London club. Looking back at his brief history in the world of football, we have collected the five best jerseys made by the London brand, in view of who knows if he will return to the field, sooner or later.