English team Coventry City will play this season in football kits that were informed by the city’s Basil Spence-designed cathedral, which was consecrated in 1962.
Designed by sports brand Hummel, the club’s home, away and third kits, as well as the goalkeeper shirts, for the 2022/2023 season all contain elements that were informed by the Grade I-listed Coventry Cathedral.
“The Core concept was linking the design to the 60th anniversary of the consecration of Coventry Cathedral,” said Hummel UK head of design Robert Revell.
“I think what this building stands for in the aftermath of world war two and the fighting spirit and resilience of the people of Coventry was an important story that we wanted to tell,” he told Dezeen.
Each of the club’s kit feature elements from the building, which was designed by Spence to replace the city’s cathedral that was bombed in world war two.
The third kit is a reinterpretation of the cathedral’s 26-metre-high baptistery window. Designed by John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens, the window contains 198 glass panels, which were replicated as coloured squares on the black kit.
The sky blue home kit and purple away kit both feature stylised versions of the cathedral’s other stained glass windows.
On the home kit, these were incorporated in two tramlines that run down the front of the shirt, while on the away kit they are imprinted into its stripes.
Consecrated in 1962, Coventry Cathedral is one of the UK’s most recognisable post-war buildings and one of a handful to be Grade I-listed.
According to Revell, translating the building into a football shirt was a challenge as the building has numerous recognisable elements.
“The most challenging element of the process was knowing which areas of the cathedral to focus on, we could have had 40-50 different kits focusing on different parts of the structure – I know as we actually drew them up,” Revell said.
“So focusing in on elements that we could use and then form a contingent of kits that worked in harmony was the most difficult part of the process.”
Revell hopes that he has created both a recognisable kit for the football club and an appropriate tribute to the city’s cathedral.
“I wanted to base the designs on sound kit direction and then incorporate the cathedral as an enhancement to the design,” he said.
“What helped was spending and couple of days in the building hand sketching stained glass and structure patination.”
Coventry Cathedral was one of the numerous buildings that were officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II. To mark her death we rounded up 30 of the most architecturally interesting buildings that she opened during her 70-year reign.
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