It’s a far cry from the days when women didn’t even have kits of their own, and instead sported baggy attire on the pitch that was made for men’s bodies. And while football’s ties with fashion are established, with male footballers dabbling in modelling and building relationships with fashion houses, the fashion world is starting to call on female footballers too as the women’s game continues to skyrocket.
How early women footballers had to make do
In the UK, women’s football started to build momentum in the late 19th Century, following the country’s first recorded women’s match in 1881, with local clubs later starting to compete against each other. But its popularity really boomed during World War One. With millions of men away from home fighting, women took on traditionally male jobs working in the factories – and as a way for them to keep fit and build their stamina for heavy physical labour, sports such as football were encouraged. The most famous factory-based team was Dick, Kerr Ladies who notably drew a huge crowd of 53,000 spectators for a match against St Helens Ladies in December 1920.
But just as women’s football was growing in popularity, its momentum was halted in 1921, when the Football Association (FA) announced a ban on women playing the sport on professional grounds and pitches. The reason given: that football was unsuitable for women and not to be encouraged. The ban was not overturned until 1971, and for 50 years women were sidelined to playing in public parks – a stark contrast to the roaring stadiums they previously shined in.
“Football was an underground activity and that meant women who played during this period would wear or borrow male football gear,” says football historian Professor Jean Williams, author of A Game for Rough Girls: A History of Women’s Football in England. Naturally, this typically looked loose and baggy on them. And it wasn’t just in the UK where women’s football was stymied: during the 20th Century, bans and restrictions swept across the globe in countries including Brazil, Belgium, France, Nigeria and Norway. Even when bans subsided, bespoke kits for women were still a rarity well into the 21st Century. Just six years ago, the Irish women’s team threatened to strike due to being treated like “fifth-class citizens”: they alleged among other things that they were forced to change out of their clothes in public toilets to and from matches because they shared kit with the youth teams. For Dr Ali Bowes, a lecturer in the sociology of sport at Nottingham Trent University, the designing of bespoke kits represents a wider attitude change: “One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the shift to women’s football being seen as its own entity and not the hand-me-down version of men’s football,” quite literally, she says.
