Nike "Ditches Templates" for 2020 Kits - More Than 65 'Chassis' Options Available
Nike is getting rid of templates. Following the debacle that was the 2016 debut of the Vapor template, with lots of similar to identical kits being released for the likes of England, France, Portugal and more, Nike has decided to up the game this year.
Also inspired by the success of the Nigeria 2018 World Cup home shirt, which, while being based on the Vapor template, showed a high level of uniqueness and easily the most popular kit that year, Nike has "ditched templates".
Nike's Heidi Burgett, Senior Director of Global Communications took to Twitter to highlight this.
We're ditching the templates. For the 2020 kits, Nike designers had 65 chassis options available to them across varying necklines, sleeves, cuffs, badge placement, etc. From hand-drawn prints to custom fonts, each team’s look will be its own.
— Heidi Burgett (@heidiburgett) February 5, 2020
The Tweet has since gone viral, amassing 327 retweets and 1.5k likes at the time of writing. This further shows just how much people have been craving unique and bespoke designs.
To make the graphics more organic and unique, they were drawn by hand by Nike's designers - this reminds us of Adidas' current brushstroke designs, although we prefer Nike's approach here so far.
We will also see more team-specific customization in fonts - unfortunately there are no pictures yet.
Now, of course there are still similarities between all kits on display today in New York, especially in the fabric structure that's pretty intricate upon close inspection. But other elements, such as the cut of the sleeves (regular / raglan) and the necks, are much more varied than before. We will see crew, v and even buttoned collars from the brand in the 2020-21 season.
It's exciting times and, while quite a few of the Nike 2020-21 kits have already been leaked, we can't wait to see the rest.
What do you think about Nike
taking this direction, as well as the first three unveiled kits developed this way? Comment below, and see all Nike 2020 national team kits here.
