Explaining the history of collarsfrom @alextwma

Transcript

Look closely at this photo. There's a collar on France's Worse Cup jersey, not a crewneck, an actual fold over collar like a polo shirt. And once you notice it, you can't unsee it. Imagine an NBA player or NFL quarterback in a collar. It would look ridiculous. So why does football? Because when organized football took shape in England in the late 1800s, the men playing it were gentlemen. Upper and middle class, well best, and playing a game in their spare time. The concept of athletic wear barely existed yes, so they played in what they already worse, button up shirts with collars. The collar was just part of what a respectable man wore on or off the pitch. It signaled that you were a gentleman even if you were covered with mud. Over the decades, everything else about the kit evolved. The heavy cotton got lighter and the long sleeves became short sleeves. The clothing fit tighter and more aerodynamically. Football shirts became highly optimized athletic equipment designed for airflow, movement, and comfort. But the collar, that little vestige of the gentleman's dress shirt better fully went away. It kept getting reinterpreted. Sometimes it was replaced by crewnecks, sometimes it came roaring back as a polo collar. Either way, the DNA was still there. Which brings us to France. Their 2026 collar is a deliberate throwback. Nike designed it as a callback to the era of France's earliest football heritage bad when jerseys were essentially dress shirts. France is actually only one of two teams at the entire twenty twenty six Worse Cup wearing a proper polo collar on their home shirt, the other being Uruguay. So the collar does nothing athletically. It adds a tiny bit of weight and serves no mechanical purpose. But that's kind of the point. It's solely there for memory. A small deliberate thread connecting a billion dollar modern sport back to the gentleman who played it in dress shirts over a century ago. For those who can spot it, it's an amazing moment of fashion history still finding its way through the cracks of everything we do.