There are also the Brazil shirts and the changes of the Juve logo. The ball moves: a challenge behind every transformation
The number ten by Roberto Baggio and the Italia 90 poster with the Olimpico in Rome as the cradle of the mascot Ciao. To an Italian who watches «Football: designing the beautiful game», an exhibition just opened at the London Design Museum, three things can happen. Remember why you fell in love or fell in love with this game as a child or child, go crazy with nostalgia or look straight in the face why more than half of the inhabitants of this land follow the World Cup.
Whoever designed the journey into 500 objects did it to relaunch the idea that the ball moves and drags us with it and it moves us and makes us mark the dates on the calendar and also makes us understand, more often than we think, what has changed. What is about to change. So you can go back free not to get stuck in the past.
It is not the ideal path for those who regret the shirts as they once were or the centrality of the Panini calendar in the years when you saw the players almost alone there, it is proof that football has created an industry, a fashion, a bond with the society. A love that lasts over time.
It is told, with photos, collectibles, videos, reproductions: the advance that continually discards the obvious and reveals the next step. It can be the assist for progress, like the rainbow flags in the stadiums of the last European Championships or the 100,000 people in front of the alternative women’s world cup in 1971 or it can be the back pass for an imminent collapse.
The symbols of a hooliganism to show off, the buu of racism that right in the middle of the games proves not to be overcome. Behind every transformation a challenge, a goal, a uniform that is often collective memory, a corner of the character of a generation or the partial imprint of a country.
The Brazil jersey is overturned and from white becomes the flag after the shame of the Maracana, after the final lost, at home, in 1950 against Uruguay. The humiliation is repeated in 2014, but the symbols hold up, protected by the magic that came before, with the colors green, blue and gold and safeguarded by a different way of crying or venting defeat.
The period marked by a global postwar in which reclaiming broken dreams is a decades-long yearning against the years of endless class conflict that devours everything. In a state overwhelmed by corruption, the devastation is such that not even 7 goals scored by Germany can represent a long-term pain. There is no space.
In London you can admire the scribbled shoes of a teenage George Best, at that age he still wrote the names of the opponents he scored against. He would then have stopped, too many names, it would have been easier for him to write down the missing teams. Under the glass there are logos that anticipate a style and the Design Museum exhibits the Juventus brand, which has gone from childish zebra to adult lettering, an example of a code that is renewed and intercepts taste. Clubs, like the way of declaring membership, interpret feelings and whoever moves first has an advantage over a piece of the future.
Experience also leaves its traces. The ball without the laces of the first World Final, 1930 is half of a result because in that comparison he had a double, a twin brought from Argentina. With their ball, they win the first half 2-1 and then that of Uruguay enters the field and there is overtaking: 4-2. The sponsor would take care of leveling the competition. The exhibition, on the other hand, settles other accounts. It is not conceived from a male perspective and women’s football does not have an angle of representation, a share confined to some room, occupies every corner of the chronology. Every decisive shot.
Among the ten, in the midst of Maradona and Messi is the American Michelle Akers, protagonist at the 1990 World Cup, in the shoe show there are models created especially for women in the mid-Eighties. In the parade of indelible photos is the day when an unofficial England raises an unrecognized world cup in Mexico, in a sold out Azteca stadium. Kick forward.
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