Ranking the 20 best-ever Ligue 1 kits of all time: Marseille, PSG, Monaco and more

If you strip back all of the sponsor’s logos, the beauty of Montpellier’s 2021-22 away kit stands out. It's a fairly simple design, but the club’s colours – the now-iconic combination of orange and blue – help the kit stand out. For the 2021-22 season, Montpellier went with a white base, finished with a dark navy trim and orange pinstripe hoops.

Almost no kit is perfect, and Evian suffers from the excessive Kappa logo, but everything else is a winning formula. The blue and pink combination is rarely seen in football, while the combination of the psychedelic swirl pattern and those three bright pink mountains – a nod to its close links with the water company – set it apart.

The chevron on Bordeaux’s home shirts is a long-standing tradition, drawn from the same shape on the club’s crest. In the 2016-17 season, it was combined with thin white pinstripes and a white collar to create a surprisingly formal kit. The colours of dark navy and white colour – the club’s traditional colours – are also a time-honoured combination.

Nice have kept their home and away kits fairly reliable across their history, and white is very much the traditional away colour. For the 2022-23 season, they incorporated elements of the home kit, with two black stripes on either side of a single red stripe running down the middle of the shirt. That combination was inverted for two other sets of stripes, running subtly down each side.

You could argue that Strasbourg’s 1992-93 home kit is one of the most experimental ever worn by a French club. The club’s traditional blue was still used as the base, but it was covered with diagonal stripes in different angles and different colours. It might sound like a lot, but somehow it managed to fit together nicely, and the Three Stripe collar wasn’t bad either.

Saint-Etienne are seen as one of the sleeping giants of French football, having won 10 league titles and reached a Champions League final. Nowadays, though, they’ve fallen to Ligue 2. While things may not be what they were, the club’s signature green is still a much-loved symbol of those previous successes. In 2018-19, they used a slightly darker green, which also appeared as a collar and trim on their off-white away shirt. As if that wasn’t enough, it was finished with the red, white and blue logo of Le Coq Sportif.

It was a controversial move to completely remove the Hechter stripe, but PSG made it work for Lionel Messi’s inaugural season in Ligue 1. In its place, the Jordan-brand designed kit went for a quiet and classic approach. The shirt came in a dark blue, while a thin red and white line ran around the collar and each sleeve.

Auxerre’s 2003-04 home shirt was more than the sum of its parts. Somehow, the white base, light blue stitching and PlayStation 2 sponsorship logo come together to create a shirt that’s far better than it sounds. It's also helped by memories of Djibril Cisse’s last season at the club, banging in 26 goals as the club finished fourth.

A lot of people understandably have a romantic connection to Marseille’s kits from the mid-1990s. One of the stand-outs was the 1996-97 away shirt, which inverted the club’s white and sky blue colours. The blue shirt was finished with a central stripe, eventually giving way to the Parmalat logo in similar colours – while a Three Stripe V-neck collar was added for a finishing touch.

The half-and-half shirt is a difficult design to pull off, but for a few years at the turn of the millennium, RC Lens were able to pull it off. The club had replaced their traditional stripes – which had been both vertical and horizontal in the past – with this down-the-middle design for the 2001-02 season. Part of the appeal of the kit was the colours, with one half in gold and the other in red.

Angers may not be the biggest name in French football, but their black and white stripes have become a regular Ligue 1 fixture since 2015. For the 2018-19 season, they simplified the design to four stripes down the front, with the central two adorned with thin gold stripes. Gold continued on other details of the shirt, a nod to the club’s 100th anniversary.

The stand-out feature of PSG’s 2005-06 away kit was how they managed to incorporate the club’s red and blue colours into the away kit. The base of the shirt was white, with dark navy sections around the collar. Across the whole shirt were thin pinstripes, alternating between red and blue.

Monaco have used a diagonal stripe on their shirts for more than 60 years, and it was designed by Grace Kelly herself after the club won the Coupe de France in 1960. It was in 2015-16 that they arguably perfected the formula. It's hard to say what is so good about this iteration, but it's something to do with the deep red, the gold detailing, or a combination of both.

Back in 1992-93, Auxerre kept things simple. Their home shirt was just plain white, and their club crest was replaced by AUXERRE in block capitals. But the away shirt was different. The two blues used across the jersey were arranged into a geometric pattern that made the shirt a classic from the golden age of Ligue 1 kits.

For the 2022-23 season, Toulouse moved away from their instantly recognisable purple colour, with the shirt’s base now mostly white. Purple was still used, though, appearing as pinstripes up and down the shirt and around the collar. It’s difficult to reinvent such an iconic colour, but Toulouse showed how it can be done without losing anything.

Some of Ligue 1’s best-loved kits are associated with Marseille, but the Southern French club took a different approach from usual in 2008-09. That season’s away kit was made up of three shades of blue, but the stand-out feature was the diamond pattern across the shirt, perfectly framing adidas’ gold logo in the centre.

Lyon have found a number of ways to bring their red and blue colours into their white shirt. For the 2021-22 season, they added an off-centre stripe made up of the two colours. The stripes were finished with a subtle pattern taken from the club crest, with a repeated lion motif across both red and blue. The colours continued onto the collar, which was also split down the middle.

Monaco’s diagonal stripe is one of the most iconic designs in Ligue 1, but it has often been confined to the red and white home kits. At the turn of the millennium, Monaco let loose. The diagonal stripe appeared on their blue and yellow away kit, which was finished with Kappa’s white logo running down each sleeve. 

PSG in the mid-'90s were a very different proposition than the modern-day Galacticos of today. Back then, the best they could hope for was second, while everyone from Auxerre to Nantes managed to win the league. Their 1995-96 kit was title-winning material, though. The club’s bright Hechter stripe sat beneath a contrasting red and blue collar, while Nike’s much-loved vector Swoosh logo managed to elevate the kit even further.

Marseille’s 1992-93 home kit, worn the season they won Ligue 1 and the Champions League, is an enduring classic from the club’s early ‘90s heyday. Its white base is complemented by the perfect shade of light blue, appearing on the club’s crest and the huge Three Stripes appearing over one shoulder. The shirt’s majesty continues into the details, including the colours of the French flag around the collar. At the end of the season, Marseille had their Ligue 1 trophy withdrawn when they were caught bribing opposition players. They were also relegated and banned from competing in Europe. Still, we’ll always have the kit.