With its soaring profile, women’s football needs a new strip for more exciting times. Meet the designers transforming the look of the league

As the profile of women’s football soars, so does its popularity: the last women’s World Cup broke records with the highest ever viewing figures. If the sport has diversified, so must the clothes that represent it.

Football kits are now coveted by those who don’t even really care about their nation’s fortunes on the pitch. Nigeria’s much-hyped green World Cup shirt – described as the best football shirt in decades – is reselling for almost double on fashion sites after selling out. The kit is enjoying a new creative lease of life as more people interact with the game.

Behind these changes are women reconceptualising the kit in a way better suited for those playing and those cheering along. “It’s previously been: you wear a top, it represents the team you support,” says Trisha Lewis, founder and manager of Romance FC, a grassroots women’s football team based in east London. “Now, we’re starting to represent our own communities, and the kit is starting to stand for our own movement and our culture.”

Romance FC designer Aimee Capstick created the kit in collaboration with Nike, taking inspiration from the pastel colours of a warm summer’s evening on Hackney Downs (where the team play), while also taking into account the variety of women who would wear it. “We had many things we had to think about in terms of the colour: is it going to compliment everybody - hair colour, skin colour?” Its soft hues seem at odds with the colours in the premiership on a Saturday.

It’s not just those who play the game who are attempting to reconceptualise football’s aesthetic. California-based Diana Al Shammari, otherwise known as the Football Gal, has been redesigning official replica kits since 2017, customising shirts and boots with floral prints and designs. “I’d had the idea in the back of my head for several years, but I didn’t act on it because I always had the fear: would I just be ruining a football kit? It’s unheard of.”

She now has more than 10,000 followers on Instagram and accepts commissions from across the world. “We were all used to the geometric shapes on the kits, and the same colours, patterns and templates,” she says. “So this was something different.”