Wear Pink and Blue: The Dulwich Hamlet 21/22 kit design
Designed with speedy-looking, dashing angles and nicks of colour dropping over the shoulder and wrapping around the body - the Dulwich Hamlet kit Paul designed this year has become a bit of an instant classic, selling faster than any previous Hamlet kit. It was devised to add a little swiftness to the players, as well as obviously being an original design, the best in our leagues, and one that fans would want to wear.
The angularity of the stripes hark back to the beloved sash design the Hamlet sported during the promotion season 17/18. Inspiration also came from a painting created in 1916 Russia. By Kazimir Malevich, a pioneer of geometric abstraction, ‘Dynamic Suprematism No.57’ (shown below), was one of Malevich’s set of Suprematist Compositions - art devised as a challenge to traditional aesthetics, an expression of the revolutionary zeal and surging modernity of the early 20th century.
Dynamic Suprematism no.57
As well as angled stripes, the colours of the kit were redesigned. The blue is now actually blue, not the purple-ish blue Hamlet have worn for the last decade or so. The bright-yet-soft pink is far less magenta and (hopefully) more pleasing on the eye than recent kits - a pink more wearable on and off-pitch. The Away shirt retains a strip of white as a nod to the popular third kit of recent years. The goalkeeper kits sport the same angled stripe patterning, but reimagined in visible-from-space, super-vivid Orange and Lime.
Like that painting, this kit is something of an expression of a social movement, of Dulwich Hamlet’s diverse, welcoming and progressive presence in the footballing world, the club is a relatively successful non-league community football club located in south east London. The men’s team currently play in England’s National League South with the women’s team playing in the South East Women's Regional Football League.
Credit for the kit design also goes to the The Hamlet Historian’s excellent piece on the history of Hamlet kits. Photos: © @LiamAsman