It’s hard for the kit-makers of striped teams to come up with something new every year.
We will have an article in the near future looking at adidas’s efforts for red-and-white-striped English teams over the last decade, while the Juventus kit for the coming season has stripes so wide that they are halves.
Another Italian side, Inter Milan, have had Nike producing their kits since 1998 and recent years have seen attempts to mix things up. It’s a theme that continues for the coming campaign.
Utilising the new Nike template, the blue is the kind of shade we remember from the beloved 1990-91 strip made by Uhlsport and while the white trim is a bit too plentiful, it’s not ruinous (oddly, the official Nike site shows a model wearing white-trimmed shorts and white socks but these aren’t part of the proper kit).
However, the real disruption comes from the diagonal stripes on the midriff of the shirt – like a more sedate version of the ‘mashup’ they wore for the Milan derby this season.
The diagonal stripes also call the mind the 1990-91 away kit:
You might think that having the logo of sponsors Pirelli – who have been with Inter since 1995 – in the same area as the noise wouldn’t make sense, but it’s likely that the decision was made with them in mind.
When a sponsor has been in situ for so long, it can almost be ignored, and so any change will once again draw the eye towards it.
Also of note are the socks, with large segments of blue and black separated by a white bar where the Nike logo is housed. It’s a design we quite like, but perhaps better for Inter with the colours reversed so that the shorts flow to the socks.
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