The enduring legacy of Denmark's 1986 World Cup kits: Stripes, chevrons and ‘carnival suits'

New York Times

a day ago

This article is part of our Kitted Out series, an exploration of the impact of soccer kits on culture and fashion.
Mexico 86 was the last of the innocent World Cups. Played in searing heat on terrible pitches, it gave us the joy of Josimar, the Hand of God, that shadow of the spider camera and some all-time great kits.
Denmark didn't just look the part, they lit up a technicolour tournament. Preben Elkjaer, Michael Laudrup and co were a red-and-white attacking machine, leaving pinstriped trails in their wake. As they dashed around and through startled opponents, they scored at will. Even the Danes' giant, italicised numbers seemed to be in motion.
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The World Cup debutants were dynamite as they danced through the group of death completed by West Germany, Uruguay and Scotland. Played three, won three. For: nine. Against: one. Diego Maradona likened them to a bullet train.
But then they were gone, confoundingly beaten 5-1 by Spain in the last 16. While Denmark were consigned to history as one of the great what-ifs, Hummel's bold kit lives on as a coveted classic, adored by fans and designers alike.
Back in 1923, entrepreneur Max Albrecht Ludwig Messmer founded a sports shoe company with his father in Hamburg, Germany. Messmer & co went on to introduce a football boot called Hummel — the German word for 'bumblebee' — the name subsequently adopted by the company in 1961. Its trademark chevrons and logo followed.
Hummel first made the kit for Denmark's national team in 1979 and, by the 1980s, the company was Danish-owned. After Denmark qualified for their first World Cup in 1985, designers Birgit Leitner and Anne-Mette Ernst were freelancers at Hummel and devised a daring, futuristic design.
'Of course, we knew it had to be red and white, but it was about sitting with the fabric samples in our hands that we had in the office, putting them together in different ways and making it work like a jersey,' Leitner told Hummel in 2023.
'Fortunately, we had a roll of striped fabric lying around, which we tried to use, and it ended up working very well.'
With its half-and-half pinstripe design, chevrons on the shoulder and V-necked collar, the lightweight kit was launched on Danish television in February 1986. The home kit was predominantly red; the away white. Both featured shirts mirrored by matching shorts, an iteration kiboshed by FIFA due to concerns about its appearance on television.
'I think it's… different,' captain Morten Olsen said, 'but I think it's a breath of fresh air.' Some scornful Danish media christened it 'the carnival suit'.
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But with an accompanying range of merchandise, including tracksuits, beach chairs and umbrellas, the design grew popular with the Danish public.
'In the summer of 1986, we regularly received messages and pictures from fans who had used the design to paint their cars and other wild things. It was crazy. We probably should have licensed it then. Then we would have been rich today,' Ernst told Hummel in 2023.
Few know football shirts better than Rob Warner. Once creative directing manager at Puma, for whom he designed Italy's 2006 World Cup strip, he outlines the contrasting components of Hummel's kit.
'It was like they took all the classic bits of football kits,' Warner tells The Athletic. 'So the chevrons over the shoulders — Puma had been doing that sort of thing; Adidas had done three stripes; Umbro had done their diamond tape over the shoulders.
'That was quite an iconic look from the 70s and early 80s. It's like, they've kind of got that and they jumped on the emerging trend of graphics, and being able to print on polyester.
'They've got the black contrast piping through the armholes as well, which was something else that was very much of the era — usually on single-colour shirts. And then they've got a V-neck but they crossed it over with the stripe on it.
'There were a lot of elements there that I think had shown up in some form or other on classic football shirts, and they just put all of them together and somehow made it work.'
Denmark had the players, a German coach in Sepp Piontek, the kit, the friendliest fans — known as 'the roligans', with 'rolig' meaning 'calm' in Danish — and Re-Sepp-Ten, the nation's biggest-selling pop song, which featured members of the squad singing, behind them. Two years earlier, they had suffered a galling defeat against Spain on penalties in the semi-finals of Euro 84. This time, they could go all the way.
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Midfielder Klaus Berggreen started all of Denmark's games in Euro 84 and three in Mexico.
'We had a very close group who had been playing together since we were young,' he tells The Athletic. 'We were happy to play together. We had great fun, and we were also proud of playing for Denmark.'
In Piontek, they had the perfect leader. 'He was a great coach, absolutely,' says Berggreen. 'First of all, he had the German discipline. He understands very fast the Danish humour. We had a lot of humour in the team. He tried to put equilibrium, a good balance. I think he was the right man at the right moment for Danish football.
'He had strong players on almost all the position in the team. He listened to his team, he listened to his players, and that was also a secret. He used the players to get even stronger.'
With matches being played at midday in temperatures of up to 35C — some at over 6,000 feet above sea level — Denmark arrived early to acclimatise.
'We went for two weeks to Colombia,' says Berggreen. 'And it was so tough training, and it means that when we started off at the championship in Mexico, we were already at 100 per cent. Normally, when you go into such a big tournament, it's better to be only on 90. You don't have to be 100 already at the start.'
In Mexico, Denmark did not wear the same kit combination twice. They beat Scotland 1-0 wearing their away shirt with red shorts and white socks. While walloping South American champions Uruguay 6-1, they were all in red. Against eventual finalists West Germany, a 2-0 win, the red jersey came with white shorts and red socks. And it was all white for the defeat by Spain — they were 1-0 up but went on to lose 5-1.
'It went out the way it went out,' says Berggren. 'But we had a very strong team and made very good publicity for Danish football in the whole world.'
Berggreen is no stranger to style. For a season, he played for Roma under Sven-Goran Eriksson in their lustrous NR shirts. After his footballing career, he launched his own clothing brand, Piro (the first two letters of Pisa and Roma, two of his former teams).
Six years after Mexico, Denmark wore another Hummel number all the way to a glorious, against-all-odds Euro 92 triumph in Sweden. The team of the mid-80s felt they were good enough to win at a trophy too.
'Yeah, we could have won the European Championship in 84 and we could also have won the Mundial (World Cup) in Mexico,' Berggreen adds. 'I think in those three, four years, we had one of the three best teams in the world.'
After the end of Denmark's two-year kit cycle, the template lived on as teams across Europe joined Hummel's hive.
Tottenham Hotspur's similar V-necked lilywhite shirt was adorned with chevrons and diagonal pinstripes from 1985-87. Think of a flowing Chris Waddle or hark back to the October night in 1986 when Glenn Hoddle temporarily handed over his No 10 for Maradona to wear at White Hart Lane for Ossie Ardiles' testimonial.
Real Madrid sported a classic of the genre and pipped Barcelona to the title in La Liga by a point while wearing it in 1986-87. The next season, Hummel kitted out Feyenoord, Real Betis, the Wales national team, and three English clubs too. First Division sides Coventry City and Southampton, and Aston Villa from the second tier, had sky blue, red, and claret and blue versions of Denmark's kit that were exact copies.
'It was as well-received back then as it is now,' former Southampton player Francis Benali tells The Athletic. 'I've clearly got fond memories of it myself because it was a kit that I wore on my debut against Derby County at The Dell.
'I remember thinking when we first wore it for the first-team photo in the season that it came out, 'Well, yeah, this is such a cool kit'. The material had a silky finish and just looked really, really good as well.
'Half and half with very thin stripes — it was just a number on the back, the Hummel branded logo, the crest of the club, and the Draper Tools sponsor with black shorts and white socks.'
When @SouthamptonFC unveil a new @hummel1923 home kit but you've already got one! 😉🔴⚪️#SaintsFC #hummel pic.twitter.com/NpPcHyvPBF
— Francis Benali MBE (@FrannyBenali) June 19, 2023
Benali, who raised over £1.3million for Cancer Research by running three gruelling charity challenges, is now a television pundit. He still has a memento to this day.
'I've got the actual shirt that I made my debut in,' he says. 'This was in an era when we had a handful of kits that we had to look after for the entire season.'
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Meanwhile, in the Midlands, Warner received a claret and blue shirt, shorts and socks under the Christmas tree in 1987. It remains his favourite Aston Villa kit.
'I then went on to deface it not long afterwards by drawing a number eight on the back for David Platt, and that was my first go at changing the design of a football shirt,' says Warner, who co-founded the Spark Design Academy.
'It kind of hit me like a lightning bolt that it's the least Villa shirt of all time, really, in terms of home shirts. Potentially, from a Denmark perspective as well. It was a real break from tradition to have something that from a certain distance even came across as pink, really.
'It was quite a departure — the same for every team that took that shirt on. It's remained iconic but it's such a departure that I think if a team showed up with something that different now, I think the response to it would be very different online.'
Hummel's senior designer Keld Moesgaard Pedersen calls the kit 'an all-time classic'.
'The shirt was so different and innovative for its time when it was released,' Pedersen tells The Athletic. 'There's a good harmony in the pattern, and the colours work well together.
'The classic red version is just beautiful but my personal favourite is probably the national team's white/red away shirt. It just works really well and has probably received less attention than the red home shirt.'
Hummel have often used the past as inspiration, channeling that iconic 1986 look for designs for Coventry in the 2019-20 season and Southampton in 2023-24.
'We felt it would be the perfect opportunity to re-release perhaps the most iconic Hummel shirt across a number of our current club teams,' says Pedersen. 'Fortunately, many of our clubs embraced the idea, and we were able to spread the concept across various leagues — Werder Bremen, FC Koln, Southampton, Coventry, Brondby, Real Betis, Saint-Etienne, Malaga, and the national team.'
The series introduced the kit to new generations and brought back memories for older fans. Not that they had ever forgotten it.
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(Top image: Design; Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; Photo: Allsport/)