Umbro Shorts

Umbro was never supposed to be a fashion brand. Founded on May 23, 1924 by brothers Harold and Wallace Humphreys in Wilmslow, Cheshire — the name squashes together HUMphreys and BROthers — it spent decades as a serious English football outfitter, its double-diamond logo stitched onto kits worn in the sport's biggest matches. Brazil lifted the 1994 World Cup in Umbro kits, the same year Manchester United won in the diamond.

America, though, met Umbro at the mall. As youth soccer exploded in the late 1980s, the brand's drawstring nylon shorts — bright, baggy, quick-drying, and stamped with that double diamond — jumped the sidelines and became everyday casualwear. By the early 90s they were everywhere: neon solids, geometric prints, checkerboard patterns that matched nothing and didn't need to. Kids wore them over bike shorts, under jeans in locker rooms, three days a week to school. The swish-swish sound of a hallway full of nylon was the ambient noise of an American middle school circa 1992, and unlike most sports apparel, Umbros were gloriously unisex — the rare fad that the whole class wore at once.

The craze faded as the decade went on and baggier streetwear took over, returning the shorts to the soccer fields they came from. The company itself kept moving through corporate hands — Nike bought Umbro in 2008 for £285 million, then sold it to Iconix Brand Group in 2012 — while the diamond kept its place in soccer. But for a certain generation of Americans, the brand will never primarily mean football heritage. It means a dresser drawer stuffed with slippery neon shorts, and the specific confidence of wearing a checkerboard pattern that could be seen from space.