The Sports Couture grand debut, a story about Dirk Bikkembergs Football’s first fashion designer

Years ago, in an interview with Wanderful Magazine, Dirk Bikkembergs confessed that his main influences were «Nike, Bruce Weber and Giorgio Armani. If you throw all three into a blender, that's my vision». It is safe to say that these three influences couldn't be more different - but are they really? Between the ultimate sportswear brand, the American photographer known for celebrating the wholesome, athletic bodies of smiling young men made in the U.S.A., and the Italian designer who redefined male elegance by simplifying and deconstructing tailoring, replacing rigidity with fluidity, there are, in fact, common threads.

What unites them is a vision of menswear that, first and foremost, seeks true universality—an ability to reach everyone. And secondly, a portrayal of masculinity that may be traditional, but is also unambiguous: clear, honest, and positive. «This fusion of sport and style has always been central to the brand, defining its unique identity and setting it apart within the fashion industry,» current creative director Lee Wood said. «It introduced a concept that perfectly blended the energy and passion of football with the sophistication of fashion, creating a brand that appealed to both sports lovers and style enthusiasts.» At the core of Dirk Bikkembergs’ story is precisely this intersection between a candid portrayal of men and their world, and a passion for design that, because of its sincere nature, had to distance itself from the affectations and grandiosity of more traditional fashion. And the world where these two forces met was football. There is one specific story that tells it all.  

It’s the year 2000. Two years earlier, the designer had debuted Dirk Bikkembergs Sport Couture in Milan—a sort of response to the intellectual and elitist fashion he had experimented with in Antwerp and Paris through his namesake line. During a fitting session, however, an unexpected issue arose. The model who was supposed to wear the looks for Bikkembergs and his team fell ill, and they needed a replacement. A stockroom worker with similar measurements was called in as a temporary stand-in. With no background in fashion, he reacted instinctively to each look: some made him feel ridiculous and uncomfortable, while others made him feel good. Bikkembergs realized he was onto something. «I started picking clothes based on his reactions, without telling him,» he later said in an interview with The New York Times in January 2008.

That man turned out to be the captain of FC Fossombrone, a small-town football club in Italy’s Marche region, which would go on to play a key role in the final chapter of Bikkembergs’ career, eventually becoming a team he would later acquire. That unexpected fitting became a foundational moment in a story that’s eccentric even by the standards of an already eccentric fashion world. And eccentric isn’t just figurative here: the etymology of the term points to a movement that moves away from a certain centre, and that’s precisely what Dirk Bikkembergs did. He began his career shoulder to shoulder with the heavyweights of avant-garde and conceptual fashion, only to gradually steer away, in pursuit of more democratic and accessible systems—not on Parisian runways, but on the green grass of San Siro.

Bikkembergs’ fascination for the football world seemed rooted in an implicit desire to distance himself from the more decadent and self-indulgent side of fashion. But what matters most is understanding where this journey took him, and where football, in turn, got him. A world governed by Olympian willpower and discipline, but also by passion and empathy, all values that the designer spoke about in the interview that opened this tribute. Athletes, with their physicality and their normality, became for Bikkembergs an ideal playing field to test couture-level tailoring, breathability and performance of technical fabrics, and futuristic, functional accessories. Even his sneakers, like – the Bix and the Tirosegno – became staples, regularly seen on the feet of stars like Giorgio Chiellini and Ludovic Giuly by the late 2000s. In 2011, Bikkembergs sold the brand, disillusioned by a fashion world that had increasingly turned into a profit-driven industry. Yet the legacy of his aesthetic lives on. Today, with Lee Wood, appointed eleven years ago and now considered the brand’s historic creative director, Bikkembergs aims to reclaim its rightful place «at the dynamic intersection of sport and fashion.»

Les Vêtements de Football – The Golden Age of Football Jerseys is a project by nss sports dedicated to the golden era of football shirts. 

The purchase is available on our website at this link.