The Olympics saw a resurgence of Union Jack, American flag, and football jersey fashion. But does it have staying power?
July 14th, 2024. In the Caribbean coastal city of Cartagena, Colombia, a sea of yellow surrounds me. The air is thick with heat and hope and ice-cold cans of Aguila beer are sold from portable, Styrofoam coolers. It is 7:01 PM when we arrive at Torre del Reloj and already twilight, the sky a deep indigo, nature abiding by the tropics and their never-changing sunset timetable. My sister and I, two British Colombians, are with a group of people we’ve met at our hostel: a pair of endearing, cheeky Essex boys, an adventurous Australian solo traveller, and three lively English girls. Despite their lack of Latin heritage, our new friends have come to watch the Copa America final in their recently purchased, probably knock-off, Colombian football shirts. They are not alone: the thousands gathered on streets and in crowded bars, Colombian and gringos alike, are all sporting patriotic garments. The world is buzzing with yellow light.
I spent this July travelling around Colombia with my sister, which happened to coincide with Copa America. For the football-illiterate, a category that until recently I am sure I fell into (one I probably still fall into), this is the top men’s quadrennial tournament of national teams from South America. As we are half-Colombian, the unexpected alignment of our trip with such a huge sporting event was an added bonus. The lead-up was insane. Everyone (and I mean everyone) was swept under the wave of patriotism that flooded the nation.
But what is patriotism? Is it a movement? An identity marker? Like many large concepts, it is rather nebulous. But patriotism as a fashion statement? This is easier to delineate. Wearing a country’s flag, or the national team’s football shirt, communicates to the external world that, at least to some degree, you are in support of said nation.
Football jerseys have recently become a staple in streetwear. If you’ve watched the blue sweater scene from The Devil Wears Prada, you’ll know that what we see in fast fashion trickles down from the high-end. If fashion was a water cycle, high-end would be a glacier: icy, sleek, uncompromising. Everything after that, all the myriad tributaries of different river systems, would be the commercialised, cheaper garments that we see on our streets every day.
Think Inamorata e Mirror Palais, where Emily Ratajkowski marketed the collection by riding around Rio in Ipanema mini shorts. Think Reiss or Burberry capitalising on Britishness. These campaigns have intensified the cultural relevance of patriotism, making wearing patriotic fits seem far less nationalist oddball and much more it-girl cool.
As José Criales-Unzueta writes for Vogue Business, “One is not buying into the country or its politics or its traditions by consuming these clothes. The product is aspirational, and what one aspires to is not the nationality but what the look represents in culture.”
In Colombia, wearing a football jersey during Copa America made one feel, if only temporarily, like a member of the country. Famously welcoming, Colombians accept foreigners with open arms; wearing their colours was the natural choice when one felt immediately at home in a country so different, and usually so geographically distant, from their own. To wear the football jersey made one a fraction more “Colombian,” and what this represents in culture is warmth, rhythm, and an infectious sort of kindness.
Natural observer that I am, I wondered what this active consumption of the state meant on a deeper level. I think it’s a comment on human nature more than anything else: that being united by a common cause feels good. Psychologically, it plays directly into our desire for group acceptance. Sartorially, it looks phenomenal when thousands of strangers are united by a nation’s colour scheme. In Colombia, this meant La Tricolor — yellow, blue, and red.
And it wasn’t just visually. Vallenato, salsa, and “El Ritmo Que Nos Une” (translated to “The Rhythm That Unites Us”) by Ryan Castro and SOG — undoubtedly Colombia’s summer anthem — poured out from inside taxis, electrifying street corners and booming through restaurants, corner shops, and clubs alike. Perhaps that’s why seemingly every foreign traveller we met turned spontaneously patriotic: they all fell slightly in love with Colombia.
As we find ourselves reeling after the 2024 Olympic games, supporting a nation through clothing is only becoming more à la mode. Though again, what this really concerns is supporting the fictitious “idea” of a country, and what it represents culturally, rather than actually supporting the politics of the nation. For example, the rise of Brazil-core has nothing to do with Lula’s policies and everything to do with the mythologised image of Brazil: beautiful, tanned bodies wearing colourful Havaianas and scaling Christ the Redeemer; happy people drinking fresh coconuts on Ipanema and playing football in the favelas. I saw a TikTok captioned “Everything about it (Brazil core) just screams happiness and nature.” What people are buying into when they purchase patriotic paraphernalia is a carefully-curated abstraction, a snippet of utopia, that for most citizens is not an everyday reality.
The stories and memories we associate with our clothes are what generate their meaning. One may covet Italian style, for example, not because one necessarily champions their foreign policy, but because the look is synonymous with elegance and beauty, and perhaps even the famous Italian belief in il dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing. Therefore, if we dress “Italian,” we too can be beautiful, chic, and able to indulge in languorous, laughter-filled, espresso-fuelled afternoons.
The cultural tales that create the image of place tie into the idea of spontaneous patriotism. In our globalised world, a young girl can identify with the idea of Brazil from what she’s seen in a 30-second video — palm trees and tropical flowers and golden sunsets — and suddenly feel inexplicably aligned with the country. The next week, to the perturbation of her cowboy boot-wearing, Americana-loving Texan mother, her 14-year-old daughter is wearing a mini-Brazil crop top and asking her, “Do you know what saudade means?”
Psychologically, one could argue that this is a form of escapism. Someone could be unsatisfied with their prosaic life, so they yearn for a distant land where everything sparkles with joy. Nevertheless, dressing patriotically seems like it’s here to stay. There is an argument for the beauty of cross-cultural links; that weaving someone else’s flag into an outfit communicates a sort of light alliance with that nation. And although it is usually spontaneous, and often aligned with sporting events or internet trends, I think it’s rather wonderful that our modern world is disintegrating the barriers between nations, connecting us through our clothing in a way that’s never been done on this scale before. 🌀
Jade Serna is a writer and aspiring journalist from London, England. She can be found on Instagram @jadesernaa.