Football—or, for Americans, soccer—has lately traded its stadium roots for streetwear cachet. Designers from Martine Rose to Demna have folded jerseys and cleats into their collections, while “blokecore” has made its way into the wardrobes of Dua Lipa and Hailey Bieber.
Now Nike is leaning in, reviving its early-2000s Total 90 line and inviting artists and collectives to reinterpret the jersey.
The newst contribution comes from Anne Imhof, the German artist whose sprawling performances fuse music, film, and choreography. For her first brand collaboration, Imhof translated the warring “houses” from Doom: House of Hope—her Park Avenue Armory project earlier this year—into rival shirts: a black-and-blue short-sleeve for the Tigers, and a red longsleeve emblazoned with a wolf’s head for the Wolves. Each carries the Doom crest on the chest and “Imhof 25” on the back, rendering the artist a player in her own game. The designs were realized with Zak Group, the London studio behind much of Imhof’s graphic identity.
The campaign stars Berlin musicians Lia Lia and ATK44, who performed a live battle at the launch during Berlin Art Week. The jerseys will be available from September 16 at Voo Berlin and Dover Street Market in London.
The choice of medium is deliberate. Football jerseys, long a staple of youth culture, embody both belonging and rivalry—codes that echo through Imhof’s work, from the dobermann-guarded Faust at the 2017 Venice Biennale to the claustrophobic intimacy of Sex in 2019. Where Nike projects athleticism, commerce, and performance optimization, Imhof brings fragility, ambivalence, and confrontation. The tension is the point: an artist known for staging communities on the brink, translating her rivalries into the language of sport.
