Two months to the day of the Play-off Final and the end of the Kappa era, Hull City went two kits into the age of Oxen with the launch of the 2026/27 change kit, which honours our past while taking us headlong into a Premier League future.
The shirt is a tasteful homage to Matchwinner’s popular 1988-90 away, replicating features such as a centrally placed crest, supplier logos on the sleeves and black and amber bars running from the neck to the set-in sleeves on a white field.
This is no slavish copy however, the neckline greatly differs from the late-80s inspiration, there is no chequerboard body pattern and the contrast tone shoulder bars are less pronounced and are not uniform in width.
It may evoke memories of Dean Windass carrying a hod or Ken De Mange swanning round Swindon’s County Ground with his slicked locks flowing, but it also provides the styling for away game heroics from models Mo Belloumi, Regan Slater, Matt Crooks and Ryan Giles.
This is a clean, simple and smart interpretation of a classic City shirt, one that works on it’s own merits. The biggest change is the elimination of red, which works in giving this its own distinct vibe while keeping the owner/chairman happy.
When Acun Ilıcalı bought the club in 2022 the Tigers had a change kit with red shorts (another throwback to an Eighties change kit and a nod to Don Robinson adding red into our colour palette) and some fans presumed that he would love this, coming from a country with a red flag. That’s an odd conclusion to draw, I mean must all American club owners want to put stars on their team’s kits? Must Indian investors insist on the addition of an Ashoka Chakra to a club crest? It’s nonsense, plus totally wrong.
Acun is a fan of Fenerbahçe, whose biggest rivals are Galatasary, who wear shirts in deep red, and a yellow that is much nearer to amber than the pale yellow used by Fener. Therefore he sees the use of red with amber by City as straying too near to Galatasaray’s colours for his liking. I can understand why he feels that way, but it’s also frustrating that Hull City’s own kit history plays second fiddle to that of a Turkish side.
That said, it’s the absence of red that makes this kit feel contemporary despite being a throwback. The aforementioned red shorted away kit and the Kappa retro range aside, red hasn’t been a part of the Tigers colour palette since the Summer of 1990. The red IBC letters on the 1995-97 and 1999/00 home shirts don’t count as that was a sponsor livery thing, not a use of club colours.
The centralised regular crest is true to the tiger-head placement on the late Eighties shirt, and may appease those who feels it’s an outrage to use the diagonal HCAFC monogram on the Seventies inspired primary shirt, but then there’ll be those who scream that the crest should only be placed over the heart. Some do like to create their own rules about what a kit can be and it doesn’t match reality, and thank goodness for that as it would stifle creativity.
The crest sits above the logo of Corenden Airlines, who return after a brief period of considering other sponsors. I feel oddly ambivalent about this: I love having the airline as a sponsor in an age of gambling sponsor ubiquity, but at the same time I’d become prepared for change and not getting it feels slightly disappointing. I’ll let it slide if the model planes go on public sale, so I can play with one in the manner Mo Belloumi did during the launch.
The body of the shirt is enhanced by a geometric Jacquard pattern, the same used on the primary shirt, and the neck and sleeves are finished with a black crew neck and cuffs with a single amber stripe. This ‘twin trim’ stripe also features on the white socks to give the full kit a unified look.
The simplicity of the white Primary kit shorts makes sense when you see the equal simplicity of the change shorts, which are black save for the club crest and Oxen logo and wordmark in white. Despite the different crest treatment, this allows for interchangeability with the Primary shirt (and socks) on our travels as is needed.
I’m gratified to see how the option of long sleeved shirts features heavily in launch photography, as it did on the primary kit launch, as the sleeve cuffs look even better on the long sleevers. It’s pleasing also that Matt Crooks has signalled his intention to don a long sleeved shirts when the temperatures drop.
I have heard some people bemoan that all kit releases are for retro designs these days and that is a fair assessment: adidas mined the general love of the trefoil logo (used on ‘performance’ apparel between 1972-1991ish and later reserved for the Originals range of reissues) during the World Cup, pairing it on change kits with Eighties neckline stylings such as wrap-over crew necks and mitred V-necks to great acclaim.
Are brands just going along with the prevailing sentiment? Camera sweeps of the England end at World Cup games showed a huge number of logo-less reissues of classic Umbro shirts from 1990, 1996 and 1998, and while some of that can be attributed to price point compared to the cost of a current Nike replica, that doesn’t entirely explain the fixation with shirts from the past.
Without wishing to enter the realms of cod psychology, given the state of modern living when paying for and heating your home, eating and drinking and having the occasional night out costs the equivalent of a platinum bucket full of diamonds, it’s no wonder people are harking back to a time in their youth when relatively they had few concerns. Suppliers of modern kits are naturally going along with the prevailing aesthetic.
I’m sure they would see it as connecting with certain points that helped establish a team’s sartorial look and building upon that visual heritage, rather than straight up copying a past design. Either way, I think Oxen have done fine job here and given us a lovely change kit.
Launch
The launch of the change kit was certainly a contrast to the primary (and not just because no dweeb leaked it this time) with it’s stirring video and recital of the Shane Rhodes ode to our urban centre upon two rivers ‘The City Speaks’. This time a chair*, a radio, a megaphone trail the launch imagery, and yet it was enough.
The Rhodes poem features again, as the words “But your familiar voice brings me back” from the poem is added to the inside of the neck. Connecting the kit launches with a singular theme is a fine tough, one that is being drowned out by the noise around crest use.
*That chair was efficiently reused for the images taken to announce the signing of Japanese ace Hidemasa Morita.
Overall
I like this a lot. A smart and clean design that nods to our past while looking achingly contemporary. In my view Oxen have delivered us back to back quality designs, and I’m not swayed by the joyless. Looking forward to the third kit to see how the full set works.
