Simply the best: How St. Louis City SC channeled Tina Turner for one of MLS’s best kits

Turner’s connection to St. Louis is one of those music stories that perhaps isn’t quite told enough. 

New Jersey will always be Bruce Springsteen’s. Minneapolis belongs to Prince. St. Louis’ musical identity is a bit more muddled - if only because it is home to so many household names. Walk down Del Mar Avenue, a famous stretch of road in the University City neighborhood, and you will stroll along a street featuring inscriptions of some of the biggest names in music history: Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Turner, Scott Joplin. 

But Turner is more important than all of them. She moved to St. Louis at 16 and performed in clubs across the city. Her shows, such as the one that Taylor snuck into over 50 years ago, are the stuff of legend. Globally, she will forever be remembered as the Queen of Rock n’ Roll, and perhaps the most influential female artist of all time. 

Those local ties haven’t quite been explored in such detail. Her association has always been there, but few have codified it in popular culture. Enter St. Louis CITY SC, then, who have been as informative as they are bold in their away kit for the next two seasons. 

The Tina Turner kit - as it has been named - is certainly pretty hard to miss. The whole thing is maximalist gold, featuring curved lines and intricately woven color patterns. The bottom left features a patch with Turner’s face, her signature placed intentionally below it. Red accents serve as nods to her iconic lipstick and nails. 

“It's subtle, but it's amazing. It actually takes your breath away when you see it in person,”  Kindle said.

The idea has been around for a while now. And it did, admittedly, take inspiration from elsewhere. Adidas, which makes kits for all 30 MLS clubs, pieced together a memorable Johnny Cash strip for Nashville SC in 2023. Kindle and her team figured that Nashville’s kit could be a starting point to do something of their own. 

“When it came to some of the music collaborations, they came tome and said, ‘there's been Johnny Cash in Nashville, what about Tina Turner?” Kindle explained. 

It only made more sense when St. Louis considered their ownership group. The MLS expansion franchise is majority women-owned - the first such in the league and one of the very few globally. Any chance to represent girl power, whatever that looked like, figured to be a good idea. They liked, too, that the kit would be Adidas' first-ever collaboration with a female music artist. 

Still, they had to get it right. Kindle had trust in her team, but certainly kept an eye on things as the concept developed over time. The word was good from early on: this thing would be memorable, shiny, and a true homage to a city great. 

“I’m a girly girl. The more glitter, the more that’s on there, the happier I am,” Kindle said. 

The club has generated plenty of programming around it, too. They have announced a concert with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, planned for Feb. 15. That comes alongside a music education program geared towards children. 

“We really wanted to make sure that from youth all the way to adults felt like they had the opportunity to not only wear the kit, celebrate the kit, but also participate in some of the programming that does continue to celebrate Tina herself,” Kindle said. 

They will host a week-long “Tina Popup retail experience”, where they will sell the kit alongside other limited edition merch. Everything will come together nicely with Tina Turner night on Aug. 22, an evening to celebrate the Queen of Rock n’ Roll’s music.

More broadly, this has been St. Louis’s remit as a club since their inception. They have long considered themselves a soccer city - and aren’t necessarily unique in MLS in that respect. But what they have done is built their identity around the imagery of the place they’re from. It’s what helps the home fans buy jerseys, watch on TV, and go to games. 

“The St Louis community, they don't like to be told what to do. They don't like to be told what they're going to support. So every time we did something, whether it was our name, whether it was our food partners, we've always gone out to the community and said, ‘What would you like to see?’” Kindle said. 

The result is another slice of history that means something - and an appropriate homage to the legend of the city. 

“You don't necessarily have to be a die hard soccer fan, but you can be a food fan, you can be a music fan, you can be a St Louis fan,” Kindle said.