Football kits are more than just sportswear. They are a symbol of a club's identity, history and culture - and each year, fans look forward to new designs.
However, occasionally a kit is made famous for all the wrong reasons.
Just that Fiorentina's controversial home jersey did to the away jersey during the 1992/93 season.
A bold 1990s design
Italian sportswear brand Lotto designed the away kit for Fiorentina. It was mostly white with purple geometric designs all over the upper part and shoulders, along with a club's recognisable purple identity and a 7 Up sponsor.
Initially, there seemed to be nothing particularly objectionable about it.
In fact, the shirt was used in competitive games by Fiorentina, where Gabriel Batistuta, Brian Laudrup and Stefan Effenberg, to name a few, were playing in it that season.
Then the supporters started to pay closer attention to the pattern.
The shocking discovery
By December 1992, some of the geometric lines were observed by fans as being in the shape of swastikas which are strongly connected to Nazi Germany.
.webp "Fiorentina’s Controversial 1992 Shirt")
As a result of the discovery, there was an instantaneous backlash.
The similarity was purely coincidental, said contemporary sources of Fiorentina and Lotto. It was an optical effect that was caused by the design, and not a deliberate use of the symbol, they said.
But this did nothing to quell the controversy.
After a few of the shapes were identified, the pattern of the kit could not be missed.
The shirt was withdrawn
The spat led Fiorentina and Lotto to take action.
The shirt was promptly pulled and another was issued, ending one of the oddest football shirt stories and all of a sudden! It is one of only a handful of football shirts to be pulled due to political connections, according to the Guardian.
Importantly, the evidence suggests that it was not Firenze's plan to put the symbol on the shirt, but rather a side effect of their design. According to Lotto, it was a bad optics accident.
How could she have failed to notice?
The weird thing about this story is the kit has been worn before the issue was realised.
There were lots of overlapping lines that formed the design, and the controversial shapes were not clearly visible from a distance.
The similarity was only finally noticed by supporters reportedly in December.
Even in the days before social media, controversial designs didn't get shared all over the web in a flash, as they might now.
The shirt was already a part of Fiorentina's season by the time the attention was drawn to it.
From embarrassment to collector's item
The controversial nature of the shirt's history combined with its popularity led to its becoming a popular collectible in football shirt circles.
These away shirts worn by the 1992/93 Fiorentina team are now considered rare football keepsakes, as the team's design was withdrawn from their use.
It started as a blunder in design and ended up being one of the most iconic and controversial football shirts of the '90s.
A football lesson in the art of football kit design
The away shirt of the 1992/93 season is a great reminder that football fashion can sometimes have utterly outlandish results.
Lotto intended to design a very strong geometric pattern. Rather, an unintentional optical phenomenon sparked controversy over the shirt.
The kit was worn, criticized, withdrawn and then became a collectible item.
It is still one of the most controversial shirts in football - and one of the best examples of when things can go wrong with a new kit, more than 30 years later.
