How Denmark's '86 World Cup Shirt Became a Cult Classic

This article originally appeared on VICE Denmark

James Dean said "live fast, die young, have a good-looking corpse" – but originally they weren't his words. It's actually in the 1949 film Knock on Any Door that John Derek's character Nick Romano drops the famous line for the first time. Its subsequent association with Dean provided an unofficial slogan for every charmingly hedonistic generation from the 1950s onwards – and even in football it has found a home; there is no team for whom the phrase is more apt than a group of unlikely World Cup debutants in Mexico, in 1986. That summer, Denmark were Romano's maxim made football.

The squad had been on a thrilling rise in international football since 1979, when the visionary German coach Sepp Piontek began to drag Denmark out of their amateur malaise and into a new, professional era. After an agonising near miss at the European Championship in France two years earlier, this trans-Atlantic adventure would bring them to the attention of the world.

With a 24 carat-golden generation of players, most of whom were at or around the fabled peak performance years of 28 to 32, the sense that everything had been building to this one unique opportunity was palpable. Denmark's happy-go-lucky fans, the Roligans, travelled across the ocean in huge numbers. Back home, their kitsch-classic World Cup song, Re-Sepp-Ten, became Denmark's biggest selling pop single of all time; and, at the tournament, the team unveiled to the world one of the most iconic shirts in football history.

Denmark's kit designer, Hummel, had been thinking outside of the box for a couple of years already. The kit for the national team in the 1984 France Euros broke from the tradition by adding white sleeves embroidered with red chevrons. Later that summer, at the Los Angeles Olympics, Hummel's effort for the Danish handball team prompted ripples of attention. With its diagonal, candy-coloured stripes on the tops, and skimpy shorts, the team were labelled bolsjedrengene (the bonbon boys). In the years leading up to Mexico, Hummel’s design team had travelled the world to source new ideas just as block-coloured patterns were becoming the in thing. The results, displayed at the World Cup kit launch in Copenhagen in February of 1986, were revelatory.

The shirt was split into two distinctive, striped panels; one half with thin red and white stripes, the other with stripes in darker shades of red. The panels on the sleeves and the shorts matched the main design, with a narrow blue line of stitching employed to enhance the combination of colours. The material was light and aerodynamic, a purposely thin shirt to account for the brutal Mexican heat. Hummel's marketing director, resplendent in a cardigan of the same design at the launch, thought domestic sales of the shirt might reach 10 million kroner (£1 million). After a bout of keepy-ups for the cameras with fellow players Per Frimann and Frank Arnesen, Morten Olsen praised the innovative design. "I think it's… different," said Denmark's usually cautious captain. "I think it's a breath of fresh air."

To say it divided public opinion before Denmark headed to the thin air of Mexico is an understatement. One journalist, Per Høyer Hansen, called it an insult to the players. "Others would use such rags for kitchen drapes," he sneered. It quickly became known among his colleagues as "The Carnival Suit", and was mocked by cartoonists in newspapers. This opinion still carries with some today. "It was totally awful when you look at it now," reflects Klaus Berggreen, one of Denmark's midfielders in that tournament, who would later work in the fashion industry. "But, as a piece of publicity, it was fantastic."

He wasn't wrong. The shirt was eventually approved by FIFA – with the curmudgeonly caveat that the shorts had to return to monochrome red – after initial concerns that the thin stripes would be problematic on television. Opinion might have been divided in Denmark, but the ground-breaking design soon had young people around the world loving it. Compared to the mass of basic and traditional shirts sported by the other teams at the tournament, it looked like something out of the pages of a science fiction comic. In the booming world of football nostalgia, that shirt – and the team that wore it – have achieved legendary status.

"In a way, it's a revolutionary shirt," says Doug Bierton, co-founder of the Classic Football Shirts website. "I think Adidas and the other big boys around at the time upped their game after seeing this. It was the dawn of the great era of football shirts, which is the graphic design era of the late-80s and early-90s." Bierton ranks Denmark '86 in the top three iconic international football shirts of all time, alongside Holland's from the 1988 European Championship and the West Germany shirt of 1988-91, made famous by their victory at Italia '90. Both of those were produced by Adidas in immediate response to the bar being raised.

The last time he had one of Denmark's '86 shirts available to buy on the site, it sold for £300 within five days. With less and less of these originals in circulation, their value is expected to keep rising. The away version of that shirt, with predominantly white stripes rather than red, is an even rarer bird and hasn't been in stock at Classic Football Shirts for over a year. Yet it's the striking red home kit that has exerted a hypnotic hold over a generation. In 2017, it topped the chart in FourFourTwo’s poll for the 50 Favourite Football Shirts Ever.

After Mexico, the design was soon co-opted for club football. Southampton, Aston Villa and Coventry all wore versions in their club colours in England, while the likes of Feyenoord, Pisa, Sporting Lisbon and Vitória de Guimarães picked it up in Europe. In 2015, the Argentine side Club Atlético Huracan wore a pastiche version for the Copa Libertadores.

Unlike quotes attributed to James Dean, the cover versions could never be more fondly remembered than the original. No matter how many clubs used that design in the years that followed, it would only ever be synonymous with one team. "I always say there's three elements that go into it," says Bierton when assessing what makes an iconic shirt. "The design, the moments and the star players."

Denmark didn't just look the part at the 1986 World Cup, they took teams apart. Some had feared the worst when they were drawn in Group E with West Germany, Uruguay and Scotland. Uruguay’s manager, Omar Borrás, called it "el grupo de la muerte" – the Group of Death – but the Danes simply nutmegged the Grim Reaper, winning all three matches to saunter through to the knockout stages. The football they played was breathtaking, particularly in their seminal 6-1 thrashing of the South American champions Uruguay. Michael Laudrup, the young genius in the team, gave the shirt its most replayed moment by sashaying through a mesh of Uruguayan defenders to score one of the goals of the tournament.

No team captured the imagination in the opening stages of the 1986 World Cup like Denmark did; they were the epitome of Scandinavian cool, all laid-back swagger and wholesome fun. Then, just as quickly as the world had fallen for them, came the heartbreak. When they went behind to Spain in the second round, their overtly attacking philosophy blew up in their face. As they piled forward in search of goals, a savvy Spanish team picked them off on the break and Denmark were butchered 5-1. It was a brutal conclusion for a team that had briefly looked capable of winning the tournament. Instead, their refusal to compromise on their principles meant they took their rightful place in the pantheon of the greatest teams to never win the World Cup.

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That group of players gradually drifted away from the team over the following years, and the shirt was never seen at an international tournament again. As a result, it’s become symbolic of a specific time in the childhoods of a generation, as powerfully evocative of that Mexican summer as Gary Lineker's wrist bandage, that spider-like shadow on the Azteca Stadium pitch and literally everything Maradona did.

Very occasionally, a team captures the mood of a nation. In 1986, Denmark’s shirt had captured the mood of a team. "It's not that the players contributed to the design," says Birgit Leitner, who worked on the shirt for Hummel, "but they were a bunch of fun and exuberant boys. Working with them could only lift your spirits."

Everyone else's too. The dream of winning the World Cup might have died early for Denmark, but has any team at the tournament ever burned so brightly and looked so good?