One of the brightest design talents in the UK, Aitor Throup came to the attention of Umbro in 2005 when he won the company’s bursary prize at the Royal College of Art. It was the innovative way he looked at garment design and his fascination with anatomy that interested Umbro.  Here he tells journalist Chris Hunt about the early stages of the design of the new England kit.

Chris: Why did you make the move from fashion to the design of the England football kit?

Aitor: “I haven’t moved away from fashion as such. The truth is, the concept of fashion itself doesn’t really interest or inspire me. I find some aspects of the fashion industry quite frivolous, and a lot of things about how it functions contradict how I work. For instance, even when I’ve shown my work at London Fashion Week I’ve never shown my garments on models, nor on the catwalks, I’ve always done installations, films and exhibitions. I enjoy working inside the fashion industry, but not necessarily playing by its rules. All my work is centered around the idea of inventing new processes and new objects within an on-going study of the human anatomy. Working on true performance apparel like the new England kit provided a great platform to apply some of those ideas.”

Chris: With your interest in how the human body functions, it seems quite logical that you have chosen to get involved with the design of sports apparel.

Aitor: “Yes, and now that I’m working with Umbro there seems to be a real parallel between the way that I work and the methodologies of designing for performance apparel. The parameters of sports design are very well defined, so it’s much easier to be very creative within those parameters without becoming abstract or irrelevant, which is my worst nightmare. It feels very natural to me to be designing performance apparel.”

Chris: Why did the design team start with a base layer to be worn under the shirt?

Aitor: “We knew we wanted the proposition to be two-layered, which is quite a new way of tackling the design of a football kit. It really came from a study of anatomy. If you think back to the renaissance artists and illustrators, like Leonardo Da Vinci, Vesalius, even Michelangelo, you know that an understanding of the aesthetic of the human body has to come from an understanding of what goes on inside it and how that informs the pressure that’s applied from the inside to the outside of the skin. We really built this garment in the same way, with an understanding of how the body works and how it moves, specifically when playing football.”

Chris: The new garments use a ‘rib’ fabric in places, to enable areas like the elbow and the underarm of the shirt to move with the body. Why is that?

Aitor: “I was very obsessed from an early stage with the idea of garments moving with your body like your skin does. The surface area of your skin grows and shrinks as your body moves. Traditionally garments are cut straight so they don’t encompass any movement, but I wanted to subvert that and a lot of the thinking on this project came from wanting to create garments that actually articulated.”

Chris: How did you evolve the idea of getting the base layer and the shirt to move with the body?

Aitor: “We started working with rib, the most basic of fabrics that communicate stretch. Rib visually expands and grows, like the skin does on a joint, stretching and contracting with movement. By looking at skin and how the joints affect it, we literally built the prototype from the inside out. We created a second skin in the form of the inner layer, and that also helped to create a specific visual that we wanted.”

Chris: How did you make the prototype?

Aitor: “The prototype was actually crafted. We hand-stitched it – we tacked it and taped it together, making it a really organic process. We created it in as much of a performance context as possible – we eliminated seams, utilized the most forward thinking and most modern of fabrics, and the end result of our prototype was this weird Frankenstein thing, that actually moved like an elasticated rib armour.”

In keeping with the concept of ‘Football Tailored’, Tomorrow Senior Designer David Blanch tells journalist Chris Hunt about the attention to detail that went into the making of this thrilling new football strip.