When Umbro was on the top of the game The collaboration with Supreme certifies the heritage of a brand that still continues to fascinate soccer and fashion fans

In these days Supreme has announced that in its next season will also put on sale sweatshirts and footballs in collaboration with Umbro. It is certainly not the first time that a streetwear brand places on the market a series of football-related items, but with Umbro, the brand of New York promises to rediscover a piece of history of European sportswear. Which means a lot for the history of soccer. 

In fact, once limited to your parents' old soccer jerseys or old bar sports, today Umbro jerseys and jackets with the two horizontal diamonds are back in fashion, enhanced by a recurring fetish for the nineties aesthetic resulting not only from the nostalgia effect in the world of soccer, but also for a sentiment of contemporary sportswear that loves to dialogue with those canons. The return of Umbro, which now sponsors West Ham, Brentford, Derby County, Schalke 04 and the Irish national team, is parallel to the re-emerging passion for brands that have never been forgotten but have certainly faded, such as Kappa or Ellesse. Only Umbro, in soccer, has always been a step above everyone.

But England, as you can tell from the brand's biography, is the true center for the Humphrey brothers' company, and in particular, the Manchester area. The association with City is historic, much denser than the one with United, since the citizens dressed Umbro from '75 to '97 and then resumed it in more recent times from 2009 to 2013. While in the other half of the city, the Red Devils have been seduced by the popularity of Nike before the cousins citizens, but even they will go through their most winning moment with kits signed Umbro, such as when they won the Champions League at the last breath with that goal of Solskjaer against Bayern Munich. The total red outfit seen in the Barcelona final, however, is not the English brand's best uniform. In fact, Manchester United's 20-year history with Umbro has featured not so much memorable red uniforms, but many other away and training shirts - always maintaining the cardinal points of the brand's aesthetic. White collar, trim on the neckline, rhombuses and various geometric figures printed in relief on the jersey pattern with experimental and unusual colors.

Umbro in the nineties had focused its templates on color projections in brick style, with a lot of gray, purple, colorful sparks with bright shades that in those years were the preferred aesthetic code. The Umbro uniforms, from the second of Ajax to that of Gullit's Chelsea, were proposed with iconographies that were on the one hand cubist and on the other futuristic, like those that appeared in the television commercials of the mid-nineties. Those fantasies have continued throughout the nineties defining the style on the field yesterday and off the field today, continuing to enchant both nostalgic and hypebeast. And now that even Supreme has succumbed to the allure of the double rhombus, everyone is running to fish out the jerseys in the basement.