admin While we appreciate the skill level needed to lob a keeper from the halfway line, the ’96/’98 kit was the true harbinger of an entire menswear phenomenon. Long-sleeved. Bright red. Slightly boxy. Back then, geometric shapes were on everything from trackies to the opening graphics of Channel 4 News. Without that shirt, there would’ve been no vintage football shirt revival. It harks back to a time before strips got streamlined and performance-driven, when audio companies sponsored world-class teams and football clubs leaned into gaudy branding as they were still learning to fully brand themselves. You don’t really see kits like that anymore.
Granted, nostalgia is a comfort blanket. Liking old things isn’t a particularly novel phenomenon. But that particular United kit pre-empted the fashion football shirts that came after—when menswear openly began to pilfer the aesthetic for aesthetes that have no real interest in the sport (another disclaimer: I am one of them). In April last year, everyman-menswear label Percival teamed up with old-school kit retailer Classic Football Shirts, and the result was a remix of ’90s shirts that sold out within minutes. KidSuper, the designer that held interim creative director at Louis Vuitton between the Abloh and Pharrell administrations, supercharged a vintage-looking football shirt with his signature candied colorway.
In 2023, dressing like a circa-1993 P.E. teacher is a thing. The surge of gray marl sweatshorts, tucked-in T-shirts, and normie sneakers are all proof of that. But what trumps that is dressing like the stars of the era—and in the ’90s, nobody burnt brighter than a Premier League superstar. There’s a cultural currency to it. British culture was football culture, and that particular Beckham shirt is a symbol of a very specific era in this country, an era when rival fans hated Manchester United—“because they were winning everything,” says British GQ‘s digital director Sam Parke (who supports Newcastle, by the way).
Earlier this summer, I was sat on a broken picnic bench at a music festival in Lincolnshire. Opposite me was a friend who is a football completist: a man that can describe most big goals of the last 30 years in obsessive detail, and can recall the exact season of a particular kit. Dozens of people were bouncing around in the football kits of yore: a girl in her mid-20s wearing a Preston North End ’96 shirt, a guy in an early noughties Aston Villa strip with Nike trackies, a group of people in old school Swindon shirts. None of them would be wearing that without the Manchester United grail of ’96/’98—and none of them came close.
This story originally ran on British GQ with the title “The Manchester United ’96/’98 home shirt is the real star of Beckham”
