Nike / Navinder Nangla Jersey By You Football Shirt

The Nike / Navinder Nangla Jersey By You football shirt was released in London in July 2024 as part of the Jersey By You x EC24 London & Paris Creator Series, a programme developed around the summer of international football. Four London- and Paris-based creatives were invited to produce limited-edition jerseys and accompanying customisation graphics, with Nangla’s contribution positioned as a nostalgic interpretation of football’s street culture. The project archive describes the design as drawing directly from his childhood experiences of playing football and combining those memories with the visual language through which his work had become recognisable.

The jersey uses a black, white and red brick-wall graphic as its base. Across the chest, the word “pashion” occupies the position normally reserved for a football club’s commercial sponsor, rendered in typography referencing Inter Milan’s historic Pirelli sponsorship. Beneath it sits the red wavering underline that recurs throughout Nangla’s paintings, graffiti and clothing. Nike branding and football-style insignia complete an object that is recognisably structured as a football shirt while simultaneously disrupting the conventions through which those shirts are normally read.

That language developed before the Nike project. Nangla’s deliberately misspelt phrases, including “Fassion Weak” and “Fassion is my Pashion”, emerged from his experiences with dyslexia and from years of having his spelling and handwriting corrected at school. He subsequently turned those perceived errors into an identifiable visual system, tagging the phrases around London and Paris during fashion weeks. What began as an unauthorised intervention around an industry he wanted to enter gradually became a language that the industry itself commissioned.

Football also predates the Nike collaboration within Nangla’s personal history. He has recalled growing up playing in constrained backstreet spaces, drawing markings onto walls so that they could function as improvised environments for football and cricket. The Jersey By You project returned that relationship to the surface of the garment: street markings, childhood football and the graphic vocabulary of his later art are condensed into a single sportswear object.

The project therefore represents a useful transition in Nangla’s practice. The same visual language that had originally gained attention through guerrilla interventions around Fashion Week was now being incorporated into an officially produced Nike object. The structure of the football jersey remained intact, but the familiar components of club branding, sponsorship and commercial graphics were replaced or altered through Nangla’s own spelling, marks and references.

The jersey was released exclusively through NikeTown London on 19 July 2024. Contemporary coverage described it as a limited run, while the surviving Jersey By You project documentation similarly identifies the creator jerseys as limited editions. No authoritative production quantity has been identified, and the Archive therefore does not assign an edition size.

The example documented here is a size Large, purchased by Disndat directly from Navinder Nangla at the NikeTown London activation. It has remained unworn and forms part of Disndat’s own Archive collection.

Disndat had no involvement in the creation or production of the Nike collaboration. The jersey entered the Archive through a longstanding personal appreciation of Nangla’s work and friendship with the artist. Its significance lies in documenting a point at which a visual language developed independently on the street crossed into an official Nike product without losing the errors, humour and graphic irregularity that had made it distinctive in the first place.