How Old School Retro Polo Shirts Became Fashion
Sportswear wasn’t meant to be fashionable. It was kit, something to train in. British style has always had a knack for taking something practical and making it mean something more. A jacket, a pair of trainers, a polo — in the right hands, at the right moment.
That's exactly what happened with retro sportswear. What started as footy kit for the terraces quietly became one of the most enduring threads running through British identity. This is the story of how it got there.
It Started on the Terraces
The story of British sportswear as fashion begins with football in the late seventies. People followed their clubs across Europe on away days and came back with gear you just couldn’t get here at the time. Fila, Ellesse, Sergio Tacchini. Labels that meant something because not everyone had them. The casual culture was about identity. The right tracksuit top or knitted polo carried status and showed you knew your stuff.
The grit and violence that ran alongside the casual scene often overshadowed what the movement was really about: football and camaraderie. These lads knew exactly what they were doing with their clothes.
The Tracksuit Moves Off the Pitch
Through the eighties, what had started on the terraces spread outward. The track top stopped being something you only saw at a ground or on a training pitch and became a wardrobe staple for youth culture.
The appeal is easy to understand. Retro sportswear is practical, comfortable, and easy to wear. A zip-up track top over a polo shirt and a decent pair of trousers was a low-effort way to look good. The formality of the mod look had loosened up, but the instinct to look sharp hadn’t gone anywhere.
By the end of the decade, it was everywhere, worn by people who had never been near a football terrace in their lives but understood instinctively that it looked good.
Britpop & British Sportswear
If the casual scene put sportswear on the map, Britpop put it on the front pages. The nineties brought a moment when working-class culture stopped quietly filtering upward and became something the whole country was paying attention to.
Bands like Blur and Oasis were the obvious focal point. An Adidas track top and a parka wasn't a stylist's decision — it was just what they wore, and half the country wanted to wear it too. Blur came at it from a different angle, more art school than terrace, but the instinct was the same.
1990s Britpop fashion drew on everyday British clothing worn by ordinary people. Pulp, The Verve, Cast. The whole scene had a visual language built around clothes that weren't trying too hard, even when the people wearing them clearly were. Sportswear sat right at the centre of that, because it carried the right references. It said something about where you were from and what you were into without needing to spell it out.
The magazines picked up on it, the high street followed, and for a few years in the mid-nineties, retro sportswear wasn't a subculture anymore. It was just fashion.
The Retro Polo Shirt
Running through the whole story, from the terraces to Britpop and beyond, is the polo shirt. It’s worth giving it its own mention because it’s done more work than almost any other single garment in British subcultural style.
Fred Perry started as a tennis brand, worn at Wimbledon and built around performance. Mods picked it up in the sixties because the clean collar and neat fit slotted perfectly into their sharper aesthetic. From there, it moved into skinhead culture, where it became a genuine staple. The casual scene wore retro polo shirts under track tops, the label and the laurel wreath visible at the collar — a quiet signal to anyone who knew what they were looking at. Britpop brought them back into focus again, this time on record sleeves and magazine covers as much as on the street.
What's remarkable is how the garment survived each transition with its credibility intact. Few pieces have crossed that many subcultural boundaries, absorbed that many different meanings, and still come out looking right. The retro polo shirt is one of the most loaded items in the British wardrobe, and it got there by being genuinely useful to every scene that adopted it.
Retro Sportswear — Still Going Strong
Retro sportswear hasn’t faded because it wasn’t just about sport. It was about identity, community, fashion and music. The lads on the terraces in 1982 weren’t thinking about fashion week, but they did know about trends.
The same gear that worked then works now for the same reasons. It’s practical, rooted in British culture, with influences from music and footy.
The Relco range reflects the history. Inspired by the love of the game and seventies casual culture, our retro track tops and polos are a nod to that era.