Westminster Menswear Archive Spotlights Legacy of Umbro With Latest Exhibit
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LONDON — Westminster Menswear Archive’s latest exhibition, “Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion,” celebrates the 100-year-old British sportswear brand’s impact on fashion.
Opening to the public from Friday at Ambika P3 in Marylebone, the exhibition features more than 118 garments from the Westminster Menswear Archive to explore how the relationship between sportswear and fashion has evolved over the years.
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Andrew Groves, director of the Westminster Menswear Archive and professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster, said Umbro has been at the forefront of the now common practice of collaborations between sportswear companies and fashion designers since 2002.
Since then, the brand has collaborated with more than 60 entities, such as Kim Jones, Virgil Abloh, Peter Saville, Christopher Raeburn, Supreme, Nigel Cabourn, Aitor Throup, Palace and Vetements.
In Groves’ opinion, Kim Jones’ collaboration with Umbro “helped him to develop and to establish the importance of sportswear in a fashion context” and eventually led to sportswear becoming the language of both Louis Vuitton and Dior Men under his direction.
“We spent over five years sourcing these rare collaborations from all over the world. The exhibition will be the first time they have been seen together, allowing visitors to see how such a diverse range of designers have reinterpreted British sportswear through Umbro,” added Danielle Sprecher, co-curator of the exhibition.
According to Groves, the Off-White coach shoe was one of the most difficult items to obtain for the exhibition.
“It took us two years to find a pair in perfect condition and with the original box. Over 93,000 Umbro clothing [items] are currently posted on eBay, and I have searched them all every day for the past two years. It led me to find not just the Off-White trainers, but also exceedingly rare 1930s football clothes,” he added.
Divided into five sections: Manchester, England, Tailored, Replica and Diamond, the exhibition looked at different stages of how Umbro reached cult status.
The Manchester part entails where it started, while the England part, by using England’s 1966 World Cup shirt produced by Umbro as a starting point, examines the nation’s complex relationship with national identity. Other examples include Jones’ use of the Tudor rose, Raeburn’s deconstruction of historical kits and Saville’s reimagined St George’s cross.
The Tailored section looks at how Umbro has influenced sportswear over the last 100 years, featuring seven archetypical Umbro garments chosen by Aitor Throup for his Archive Research Project in 2011.
The Replica part looks at how pattern is used to create both repetition and variation with examples of England’s third shirt from the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, and how it was later reimagined by both Palace Skateboards and New Order.
The last section, Diamond, shows how the brand’s logo became a powerful branding tool in the world of fashion, scoring high-profile collaborations with top designers like Jones, Abloh and Demna at Balenciaga.
“It’s incredibly rare for any company to survive for a hundred years, but Umbro has managed to do so by their ability to adapt to each new generation. Umbro was founded in 1924, just five years after the Balenciaga couture house was established,” Groves said.
“What is interesting is that sportswear has become the dominant language of fashion to the point where Balenciaga is no longer a couture house but rather a sportswear company. In the end, sportswear became the common language of dress for everyone, and that in part is down to Umbro,” he added.
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