Welcome to The Vault, a new series from MUNDIAL where we celebrate the artefacts, objects, iconic global products, and little bits of tat that make football history fizz with wonder. It could be anything from Predators to Kings, an exceptionally rare Inter Milan kit from the 80s or a football stamp from Guinea-Bissau. Balls, film posters, statues, fan memorabilia, bootleg shirts—anything that we think should be cherished.
Each week, we’ll interview someone connected to an object that we believe deserves to go into The Vault: forever enshrined and immortalised in an archive of joy. Rob Warner is a design legend. A former creative director at Umbro and Puma, he’s had his hand in designing kits and apparel for the likes of the Cameroon football team, Usain Bolt, a World Cup-winning set for Italy, and many more. He also spent years at Umbro, painstakingly crafting England kits from concept to the finished product. He’s forgotten more about shirts than most people will ever know, and so we decided to catch up with him about England’s kits at Euro 2012, the final iteration of shirts to be designed by Umbro…
“It was really interesting designing the home kit for the Euros because England had never had a white and red kit before. It had never previously featured just those colours of the flag. Historically, I mean, even if you watch footage of Italia 90, a lot of fans would take the flag of Britain rather than the flag of England. So it was really about honing in on that national identity. The intent with going purely white and red on the home kit for the tournament was to make a statement, really, that these are the colours of England.
“We were conscious that it was going to be leading into the 150th anniversary of the FA the following year. So, we wanted to do something that would make a mark, and at the time that we were designing it we didn't realise it'd be the last Umbro England kit.
“So we'd thought about where we'd come from with the tailored by Umbro collection that the team had done for England in 2010, and this whole idea of bespoke tailoring carried through with our work with Peter Saville in 2011 and then into 2012. So, things like the collar and the little hidden details under the cuffs.
“We wanted it to be a nod to traditional menswear but also be accessible to the way that England fans express themselves, where you can be very bold and brash about it, or you can be more subtle about how you wear it. So, having these details that were somewhat hidden meant you could reveal them or not, depending on if you wanted to.
“We spent a lot of time working with the kit on the body, so it wasn't just purely sketch-based. We worked really closely on models so it was properly crafted. We had two ladies that worked in a sample room in the office at that time that had originally been in the Umbro factory when everything was manufactured in Wilmslow.
“So we'd get them, making mock-ups and putting stuff together. So it was amazing the level of detail we could get into, because we'd work with the models and get through rounds of prototypes really quickly.