Of all the things football leaves behind, the shirts are often the easiest to hold onto. Scores blur, matches collapse into highlights, players become half-memory, half-myth.
But kits? They stay sharp. The collar. The crest. The way a number sat on the back. And for Leo Colacicco, founder of Italian label LC23, one shirt in particular never really left: England’s 1990 Umbro kit, worn in the heat and theatre of Italia 90, and forever tied to the brilliant, chaotic pull of Paul Gascoigne.
LC23’s third collaboration with Umbro begins there, somewhere between memory and material. Titled #19, the capsule forms part of Umbro’s ongoing “Tailored for Umbro” series, but it feels more like LC23 turning over a childhood souvenir in his hands.
The collection is rooted in Puglia in 1990, in the long warm days of a World Cup hosted close to home, when football seemed to spill out of the television and into the streets.
“I was 10 years old and I remember that summer vividly,” Colacicco tells me. “One of the best ever here in Puglia: it’s not every day you get to experience a World Cup close to home.” The memories come back in bright, familiar flashes. “The magical nights,” he continues, “Totò Schillaci, the beautiful mascot of Italia 90... and also England with their amazing uniforms and Gazza Gascoigne.”
For a young Italian boy in Puglia, England might not have been the obvious emotional centre of that tournament. But football rarely works in obvious ways. Certain players cut through. Certain shirts sit differently. Certain moments become bigger than the result. Gazza, with all his ability and unruly feeling, became one of those figures: a player who seemed to carry the whole drama of football in his face.
“Gazza was one of the most iconic players in the history of football,” says Colacicco. “An incredible player who stood out on the pitch for his technical and competitive skills, and off the pitch for his exuberant character and his bold, eccentric personality. This ’90 England Umbro kit is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful in football history.”
That kit, of course, has long since become part of football’s visual canon. White, graphic, beautifully balanced, loaded now with the soft ache of Italia 90 nostalgia. But with #19, LC23 hasn’t simply remade it, or treated it as an archive reference to be dusted off and reproduced. Instead, Colacicco has pulled it into the world of tailoring, craft and local production, transforming the language of a football jersey into something altogether more formal.
The capsule comprises three double-layer shirts, each cut from Italian Oxford fabric and made by skilled artisans in Puglia, LC23’s home. They are inspired by three Umbro jerseys showcased in Italy in 1990: the white home, the red away and the sky-blue third.
Each shirt features a solid colour top layer with a pinstripe layer beneath, creating a quiet tension between the match shirt and the dress shirt, the pitch and the piazza, the tunnel and the trattoria table after the game.
For LC23, that meeting point between football and fashion is not a sudden lane change. It is where the brand has always found its rhythm. “Trying to blend the world of sport, and football in particular, with fashion is a natural thing for LC23,” he says. “We’ve always done it, and it’s part of our DNA. This time too, it was natural and spontaneous to try to transform a football jersey into a shirt.”
That word, spontaneous, feels important here, mostly because the pieces themselves are highly considered. The magic is that they don’t feel laboured and there's humour in them. They don’t scream football shirt, but they know exactly what they are referencing. Crests, player numbers and insignia are subtly reworked through appliqué and embroidery. The familiar codes of a match-worn jersey are lifted out of polyester and placed somewhere more refined, without losing the original feeling.
“In general, I believe that details always make the difference in our work,” adds Colacicco. “I love the details of the football match-worn jerseys: the embroidery of the team names, the competition names, the badges, the small numbers on the front of the shirt. We tried to transfer all these details to the shirts, with very high-quality and intricate embroideries, striving to remain faithful to the original.”
That faithfulness sits in the smallest gestures. The cufflinks carry Umbro branding. The heritage signifiers are present, but adjusted. And in perhaps the neatest detail, LC23’s usual number 23 is swapped out for 19, a nod to Gascoigne and the name of the collaboration itself. It is the kind of reference that rewards the person looking closely, which is often where the best football clothing lives. Not in the obvious badge slap, but in the tiny coded detail that makes another person in the room clock it.
There is also a strong sense of place running through the project. The shirts are not just inspired by Puglia; they are made there. Using Italian Oxford fabric and local artisans, the capsule brings Umbro into a world that feels deliberately outside the brand’s usual sporting frame. This is football heritage viewed through southern Italian craft, through a slower and more tactile language.
“It’s always important for us,” says Colacicco, “and it was especially important on this occasion, to try to bring Umbro into an unusual dimension, new compared to what their world is.”
That unusual dimension continues in the campaign, shot by Italian photographer Valerio Nico around Colacicco's hometown. The imagery moves through the historic centre, the countryside, the sea and San Nicola Stadium in Bari. Rather than building a glossy football fantasy, it returns to something much more intimate: the places where football first happens before anyone thinks to call it sport, culture or product.
“These are the same places where I played soccer as a child,” says Colacicco. “In the streets, in front of churches, in the countryside, by the sea... all you had to do was build a goal and bring a ball to start playing.”
And then there is San Nicola Stadium. Built and inaugurated for Italia 90, it sits at the emotional centre of this story. On 7 July 1990, Italy and England met there in the third-place play-off. Colacicco was in the stands, cheering for the Azzurri. Gazza, suspended, did not play. Italy won 2-1, with goals from Roberto Baggio and Totò Schillaci. The facts are all there, neat and historic. But memory, especially football memory, has its own way of arranging things.
Gazza may have missed the match, but he still belongs to Colacicco's recollection of that summer. So does the Umbro shirt. So does the stadium. So does Puglia. That is what #19 understands so well: football is rarely remembered as one clean sequence of events. It comes back as weather, colour, fabric, noise, personality. As a player you couldn’t stop watching. As a kit you never quite forgot.
With #19, LC23 and Umbro have not simply revisited Italia 90. They have softened it, tailored it, and placed it back in the landscape that made it feel so alive in the first place.
The result? A capsule that treats football heritage with real feeling, but also with a wink. A collection for those who know the reference, and for those who simply understand that sometimes the most powerful football stories begin not inside a stadium, but in the streets outside, with a ball, a makeshift goal and a summer that never really leaves.