Andreas Brehme takes a deep breath. His chest heaves, pushing forward his country’s colours. It’s 85 minutes into the World Cup final, and he’s stood over a penalty kick, waiting for the ref’s whistle. This is the last meaningful shot any player will take representing the country of West Germany. It could win them the Jules Rimet for the third time. His teammate, the inimitable and universally adored Rudi Völler, has drawn a questionable foul out of the Argentinian Roberto Sensini. With the scores locked at 0–0, Brehme is under immense pressure. Not usually the team’s penalty taker—the iconoclastic Lothar Mätthaus doesn’t feel comfortable taking the shot with a new pair of boots—the left wing-back lines up the shot with his right. Despite having a howitzer of a left peg, Brehme feels more accurate with his ‘weaker’ foot. Again, he breathes in, puffs out his chest, and approaches the ball.
The enduring image of Italia 90 changes based on your nationality and values. Ask a diehard England fan? It’s got to be Gazza’s tears. For the African diaspora? It’s Roger Milla’s hips. True neutrals or fair-weather fans might talk about Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun Dorma’. The sickos might punt for Frank Rijkaard and Völler’s bizarre spitting match.
For the German people, it’s the photo of Brehme’s celebration. All blonde hair and sinew, leaping into the air with his teammates trailing him, Brehme’s moment was another milestone in a tumultuous period for the country. A little over a year earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen. Just three months later, East and West Germany would officially reunify.
But what about the shirt in that picture? That beautiful, beautiful shirt. The geometric pattern. The first time a West German strip had proudly showcased the red, gold and black. Those famous three stripes and the trefoil logo. Originally designed for the European Championships two years prior, this West Germany kit has entered the annals as one of the most important and influential in the history of sport.
All blonde hair and sinew, leaping into the air with his teammates trailing him
“It was made in the 80s, almost 45 years ago, and people still want to talk to me about it,” says Ina Franzmann, the jersey’s designer. “Everybody recognises this design, and that makes me very proud.”
The granddaughter of a tailor, Franzmann was always drawn to fashion and design. After studying the subject at university, she found a job at adidas in 1984, where, under the leadership of founder Adolf Dassler’s son, Horst, the footwear brand began to explore new opportunities in apparel design.
“It was still a very small family company at that time,” Franzman says of her introduction to adidas. “It was an exciting place to work. The vision was very much run by Horst. We had a small product team that was developing and designing apparel with a real passion for sport.”
Franzmann admits that passion wasn’t the most natural thing for her. She had “very little” interest in football before joining adidas’ first football-specific design team, but she thinks that helped her change a staid and stuffy market for the better.
“If you aren’t influenced by what has come before, you come with an open mind, which can help. This attitude offers great opportunity and the potential for new things. Before this time, the football market was very conservative. The German kit was white with a black trim. It was sober and had a very clean look.”
Ina Franzmann
In your mind's eye, you can probably see another classic German football image. It's 1974, and West Germany have pipped their arch-rival, the Netherlands, to the World Cup. There he is, the Kaiser Franz Beckenbauer, lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy over his head, wearing that classic white and black kit.
Dassler wanted something different. Taking over the design for the West Germany kit in 1980, the company was limited in their ability to produce a new version bursting with colour. It wasn’t until the middle of the decade that technical advancements made more adventurous kits possible.
“There’s a few reasons that kit became so iconic,” writer and researcher Alex Ireland tells me over email. Ireland has published two books on the evolution of football shirts. His first, Pretty in Poly, has Franzmann’s design as one of the nine kits on its front cover.
“It was one of the first high-profile designs permitted by a new technology called sublimation, where complex patterns could be printed into fabric. Before this, designers were restricted to quite simple designs, and any complex elements had to be machined by hand.”
With the technology and the buy-in from the big man upstairs, the stage was set for Franzmann to go to work. She says the design team operated separately, working on their ideas as sketches before coming back together to flesh out ideas.
Franzmann can’t quite remember when the idea for the pattern came to her. At the time, she was inspired by the work of Neville Broady, a graphic designer, typographer and art director who worked on magazines such as The Face and designed album art for Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode.
Franzmann knew she wanted a design that spoke of future success and helped the players perform. The story goes that the lines of the pattern represent West Germany’s World Cup performances: starting high in 1974 on the left shoulder, dipping in 1978 when they were bundled out in the second group stage, before rebounding to second place in 1982 and 1986. The pattern pointing back towards the left shoulder was to signify victory in 1988 and 1990.
“The idea was to go from one shoulder to the other in an upwards motion; this is to show success,” Franzmann explains. “But the placement of the design was also to show the athletic body. These are strong men with big chests and shoulders. I wanted to make them feel good in the shirt, to have the impact to win.”
The shirt’s first outing ended in defeat, however. At the European Championships in 1988, West Germany would lose in the semis to the Netherlands, who were also wearing an iconic shirt designed by Franzmann and adidas. Work had already begun on a new shirt for Italia 90. That was quickly kiboshed after a meeting between Beckenbauer, then West Germany’s manager, and a representative of the brand.
“Franz Beckenbauer decided to keep the kit,” says Franzmann. “He just said, ‘this kit is very strong, we don’t need anything new’.”
That support from an establishment figure was needed. Franzmann says the initial response to the shirt was mixed. Again, probably due to the conservatism of German football, but also thanks to the unease many Germans felt about waving their flag.
“There were a lot of critiques,” says Franzmann. “For understandable reasons, some people just didn’t like the colours of the flag. In the field of design, be that fashion, architecture, art, anything really, the new, the revolutionary is viewed with suspicion, with scepticism. Only after a while is it viewed as something positive.”
Franzmann knew she wanted a design that spoke of future success and helped the players perform
Why is this shirt viewed so positively both in Germany and across the world? Ireland says it's a mix of factors, but the design is “so simple but so recognisable” and that the design can be adapted and repackaged as “a coaster or a keyring, and you’d still know it’s that shirt”.
I ask Franzmann that same question. Does she think it's simply the design, or does the team’s success in the strip and the subsequent optimism of reunification give a certain rose-tinted view of the kit?
“I think it’s still the design,” she says with humility. “The shirts were so discreet before, and here we came with a big hit of colour. It was like bang! It was unique, but yes, the triumph was lucky. Both played a huge factor in its success.”
You only need to look at the subsequent explosion of colour, patterns and brands that came in the 90s. Those adidas kits ushered in a new age of football as fashion and Italia 90 made it cool to be a football fan again.
“As football's popularity recovered from the hooliganism and violence of the 1970s and 1980s, a broader section of society began to engage with it, and therefore to wear replica kits,” says Ireland. “From the late 1980s, sportswear increasingly became worn as leisurewear, and as part of that, it became more acceptable to wear a replica shirt in different situations other than just when going to a match.”
West Germany’s kit became both a direct touchpoint and cultural influence on this new wave. There have been direct homages—how many people have you seen at a festival wearing that Cork City x Guinness number?—and re-works. Germany’s kit for the 2018 World Cup, for example, mimicked the pattern but did away with the still divisive red, black and gold colours.
Franzmann tells me that for many years, nobody wanted to speak to her about the shirt. After football, she moved on to tennis, designing products for signature athletes such as Steffi Graf and Stefan Edberg. She left adidas in the early 90s to pursue freelance work.
It wasn’t until the company looked to commemorate the design on its 25th birthday in 2015 that they acknowledged who’d submitted the initial design. When Franzmann joined in the festivities, her profile grew. Now a professor of fashion design, she’s enjoying passing on her skills to the next generation while fielding the occasional requests for interviews from nerdy football shirt obsessives.
“A few years ago, I was at an event in Manchester run by Classic Football Shirts, and there were famous players there, as well as lots of exhibitions. Everyone there knew my design. They were so familiar with the pattern. To have that impact with your work, it can only make you proud.”
