Umbro 2011

Around March 2011, I attended a design briefing by Umbro, which was about taking inspiration from, and re-inventing 4 of their iconic menswear pieces. The idea of designing menswear initially sent me running for the hills (not a field I'd even contemplated exploring before), however after a shaky start working with the most boring colour palette I'd ever come up with, (I'm not featuring that bit), I decided to break all the rules by thinking football loving men would wear purple and got completely sucked into the project, resulting in my designs being chosen for the winning collection.

  I took my inspiration from the Umbro flicker archive of football shirts, mainly the huge variety of colours and directions of stripes found on the shirts. Following this, I worked on a concept of designing scarves which could sit on top of a football strip for fans to wear when attending a match. I ended up making a final piece which was an interpretation of a jacket lapel, enabling a simple t-shirt to be worn underneath which would then look far smarter and more exciting with the addition of the scarf.

  The final collection was a collaboration between Footwear, Menswear, Textile and Vehicle design students from the RCA. As a team we exhibited our pieces in an exhibition alongside the RCA Fashion Shows 2011 in our own Umbro locker room - see below!