Today we’re looking at shirt from top-flight Brazilian club Fluminense, with their 2001-03 home shirt – a kit for which the word “striped” does not seem sufficient. Looking like stick of seaside rock in a variety of fruity flavours, it’s a bold design from Adidas that combines Fluminense’s traditional burgundy, green and white stripes with a thick red stripe across the shoulders, presumably included to give the famous three stripes of Adidas a clear space to work with. Despite the visual busyness of the kit I think it all comes together in a rather pleasing way, possibly because the relatively muted colours keep things calm even when you look more closely and realise that each white stripe has a very narrow red and green stripe down each side. There are herds of zebra with fewer stripes than this shirt. What I do like about it is that it has an exotic flavour to it. Personally, as a British football fan this is the kind of shirt that really does look as though it comes from
If you were putting together a list of history’s most iconic football kits, the gold and green of Brazil would surely be right at the top. I mean, number one with a bullet. What else could possibly compete? It’s practically the uniform of the World Cup itself, the outfit of some truly legendary players, the merest hint of it summoning forth memories of incredible goals, incredible teams and, incredibly, a good television commercial . Yes, it would be wonderful if I had an official Brazil shirt. I don’t. I have this thing instead, I’m sure a lot of kids who were into football ended up with unofficial versions of shirts, cheap knock-offs and loosely club-affiliated “street wear” tops bought by relatives who didn’t know better or who (understandably) baulked at paying ridiculous prices for real-deal shirts. I definitely had some of these shirts growing up in varying degrees of quality, from a retro-style t-shirt based on Brazil’s seventies shirts that I loved so much I wore it