The Tigers unveiled the change shirt to be worn in the club’s 120th birthday year today, on the eve of the eve of 2024/25’s opening day. So, let’s take a good look…
**SPOILER ALERT** It’s an absolute classic!
OVERVIEW
Hull-elujah! Prayers are sometimes answered! Not necessarily in a timely manner, but hey, that’s what faith is for. Ok I’ll stop with the religious allusions, but I’ve been making entreaties to the god or goddess of polyester, asking for four things from at least one kit from this years set…
- A polo collar.
It’s been 20 years since a proper turn-over collar appeared on a Hull City match shirt. The race to reduce weight on shirts, as design imperatives moved from aesthetics to performance in the mid 2000s, seemed to have killed off the classic styling of a bonafide, honest-to-God turn-over collar forever. Now however, they’re enjoying a bit a slow-burn renaissance as we’ve reached the point where you can’t make a shirt any thinner without it being more see through than a flat pint of Bud Light **Bleh!** - A traditional white change kit.
Once upon a time all City away kits were all-white, then kit launches became an annual occurrence and that meant mixing it up a bit to avoid visual and retail stagnation, with green, maroon, purple, silver and many other colours given a go. The primary kit, with it’s black shorts and black socks, means some high contrast lightness is needed elsewhere in the kit-set and after last-season’s all-amber, traditional all-white fits the bill in a significant anniversary year. - A bit of visual intrigue
Just because a kit is in a traditional colourway doesn’t mean you can’t funk it up a bit. The window of opportunity for a bold pattern is closing, as we head into a period of clean, classic looking design. This is a natural progression: after the wild full-shirt prints of the 1990s came a period of retro driven minimalism, inspired by the popularity of reproductions of 1960s cotton shirts by firms such as TOFFS. Again, we’re at a tipping point of kit design, the last few years have seen whacky patterns abound but we’re now seeing them being limited to pre-match shirts as primary, change and third kits rely on solid colour and trim to tell stories. The primary kit is lovely but simple, so were looking to a change shirt for some patterned fun. - More expansive use of Kappa branding
When reviewing the primary kit and stating what I want from the rest of the kit-set I said “It’d be a waste of the association with Kappa if we don’t get something with big and chavvy, spitting off the balcony at the top of Prinny Quay in the 90s vibes massive branding at some point.” I had no idea what the change kit would look like when I wrote that, but I hoped for an ‘Omini’ logo banda on one of the kits.
Well, mine eyes have seen the glory! This away kit, gives me everything I wanted, and I can’t muster enough superlatives to do it justice, but here’s some: It is wonderful, glorious, classy and yet sophisticated, a triumph!
That polo collar, with two skinny bands of amber and black separated by a Jacquard weave in the ribbing, it makes my loins stiffen. It is a thing of majestic beauty.
Will you keep it down flat or have it standing to attention, popped in a Cantona-stylee? Maybe you should buy two of these shirts and do both, you do you, but it’s been two decades since we’ve had that choice.
Multi-‘Omini’ sleeves? Yes, yes, yes! An affirmative for each uomo e donna silhouette per sleeve. You wouldn’t want this on all of the kits, after all there’s already three Kappa logos on the home shirt without adding more, but on a predominantly white kit, the three black sublimated ‘Omini’ curving over the shoulders just works.
An amber and black, Jackson Pollock-esque paint splatter interpretation of a woodland camouflage pattern either side of the ‘banda’, to liven up the sleeves of an otherwise traditional white away shirt? I’ll never pay off my credit card at this rate, will I?
For many people having a sewn-on, woven club crest is a premium feature in contrast to the perceived cheapness of a glued on, plectrum shaped plastic patch, so many will find that feature an improvement on 2023/24’s offerings, but the improvements don’t stop there. Less noticeable at distance than the sublimated print sleeves is the quasi-herringbone pattern embossed into the fabric (also seen on the home shirts) and such texturing really elevates a shirt. The heft of the rib-knit collar and cuffs with the added texture of a Jaquard weave within the knit feels high quality.
In fact, the whole garment feels a cut above what we were given last year, the material, the fit, the structure, the ‘Omini’, sponsor and back of neck transfers (‘120 years’ text in this case) all seem to have been done better. This shirt represents a quantum leap in quality from our supplier, and we’ve married that build quality to a design with real style and assured flamboyance.
I really like this years’ home kit, but I truly love, love, love the accompanying change kit. I think in time it will be considered a real classic, and that’s presuming people don’t think that already. Why wouldn’t they? A traditional club colourway on a shirt with bold and vibrant elements that lift it beyond the stratosphere of functional yet mundane, to the exosphere of excellence. I’ve always pointed to Umbro’s 2007/08 away shirt as the highest standard of a traditional Tigers change look, but I think this is going to challenge that standing.
Whatever you think about our 2024/25 preparations in terms of transfer activity, surely all Tiger Nationals can be on the same page about this paragon of polyester production that ranks highly in the pantheon of white Hull City away kits. Take a bow Hull City and Kappa Türkiye, and a million thanks for the first polo collar in two decades.
OTHER THOUGHTS AND CONSIDERATIONS.
The amber is just a smidge deeper than that of the home shirt, and that’s absolutely natural. Amber surrounded by white can look a bit insipid, so you deepen it a wee bit to make sure it still pops. There are precedents aplenty: 1997/98 by Super League, 1998/99 by Olympic, 2007/08 by Umbro, 2010/11 by adidas (‘Collegiate gold’ v the home kit’s ‘Sonic Gold’ in adidas colour palette parlance) and the most recent example: 2017/18 by Umbro.
The only sadness regarding the sleeve ‘banda’ of repeating Kappa ‘Omini’ is that the shirt isn’t available in long sleeves, how good would it look going all the way down the arm. I curse you, base-layers! I wondered for a while if the black lines that frame the repeating, stacked ‘Omini’ on the shorts should have been added to the shirts too, but concluded that adding the lines to the sleeves might cut down the space for the amber and black camo print, and that’s limited enough since it’s only on the Raglan sleeves.
There’s a bit more give in the replica shirts this year compared to last year. Whereas the player shirts were super-stretchy last season, the replicas were 100% polyester and quite rigid, however there’s some Elastane in the new shop bought shirts.
In an era of yearly kit cycles, you can’t have all-white as your change kit all the time, unless you don’t care about retail sales (and if you don’t then why have a yearly kit cycle at all?), which means all-white is merely part of our away kit style rotation, when it once was the default style. As a result, more people make an unflattering and ignorant references to ‘looking like Leeds’ when we do have all-white than should, or at least they have in the past.
This time, the sleeve pattern, abstract as it is, gives the whole kit a screamingly Hull City-specific aesthetic. So you’d have to be quite the buffoon to make any mention of perceived Leedsiness. Never mind that Hull City had a white change shirt in 1904, when Leeds United were just a twinkle in Ambrose Langley’s nad-sack, and Leeds, when they spawned 15 years after the Tigers were founded, wore black and white stripes, then blue and white stripes, and yet later yellow and blue shirts before they copied Real Madrid’s homework.
A sponsor insisting that their company colours be used instead of a tone sympathetic to the garment their logo is being applied to has ruined many a football shirt, but Corendon have shown admirable restraint. That much was obvious when they agreed to a virtually invisible tonal applique on the ‘blackout’ third shirt in 2022/23, but think about how much a red logomark would have looked egregious on this shirt. Instead it’s in harmonious black, and so Corendon’s ongoing co-operation warrants ongoing commendation.
