Can Liverpool’s Creative Football Scene Turn Local Authenticity Into Global Influence?
Words Nali Simukulwa
Images courtesy of Ella McConville and Nali Simukulwa
Get Your Kits Out Festival celebrations with the Adobe Women’s FA Cup trophy post presentation
On a Saturday night in Liverpool, the city centre thrums with life as bouncing blow-drys and trendy outfits spill out of bars. But come Sunday afternoon, glad-rags are swapped for tracksuits as all of the city’s pubs stretching from Anfield to Hill Dickinson (and beyond) fill with fans fervently watching Liverpool FC (LFC) and Everton FC (EFC) games. If a goal is scored, cheers echo across the area. This is my city in a state of homeostasis, where football, style, and social life are eternally intertwined. These worlds collided one recent Saturday, September 27 to be exact, when Get Your Kits Out Festival (GYKO) partnered with footwear retailer schuh to transform Fabric studio — an airy venue nestled in Liverpool’s historic garment district — into a football and fashion haven.
More than a one-off celebration, GYKO offered a glimpse of Liverpool’s growing identity as a creative hub where football, fashion, and local pride collide. From 11 AM, attendees browsed a market of vendors selling everything from scrunchies and crest-emblazoned bum bags to one-of-a-kind football-inspired couture pieces. Some happily embroidered designs into sheets of card in a workshop led by textile artist Nicole Chui, while others posed with the Adobe Women’s FA Cup. Expert panellists, including Helen Hardy, founder of kit retailer FOUDYS and Holly Gilbertson, managing partner of sports consultancy Pacer.global, discussed how women’s fandom is shaping football kit culture. Hardy shared insights on the differences between female and male sportswear consumers, while Gilbertson debated whether seemingly endless kit drops across football have led us to over-saturation and ‘late stage kit capitalism’. In the evening, a fashion presentation styled local grassroots players in a lookbook of emerging designers, blurring the boundaries between fashion and creative merchandise.
As a culture writer with a love for both football and Liverpool, the day came hotly anticipated, not least because I was scheduled to speak on the ‘Future of Football kits’ panel and walk in the fashion presentation. GYKO transformed Liverpool into a creative launchpad for future collaboration, a feat proudly achieved by organisers and GIRLFANS zine co-founders Jacqui McAssey and Zoë Hitchen.“There’s a rich, grassroots culture in Liverpool: people making, designing, collecting, and reinterpreting football through fashion, art, and community projects,” shares McAssey. “That scene deserved its own space, something that recognised how much creativity is coming out of football beyond the professional game. The SEASON zine OG adds that bringing together local and visiting creatives was a conscious choice — a way to position Liverpool’s scene within a broader creative network.
The event delivered on its promise: a vivid snapshot of Liverpool’s creative scene, blending local photographers and retailers with visiting talent in a refreshing attempt to decentralise London and Manchester as the UK’s top creative cultural contributors. With schuh covering costs and sellers keeping every penny earned, the market gave financial weight to a class of artists who usually work for love, not livelihood. Such a melange of local and visiting attendees revealed Liverpool’s status at the intersection of football and fashion right now: productive, dynamic, but still under the radar. With a scene rich in promise, SEASON zine asks whether Liverpool’s scene can channel that spirit into a self-sufficient global movement.
GYKO Festival stalls and highlights
The crossover between football and style runs deep in Merseyside. McAssey notes how hosting GYKO in Liverpool stemmed from the desire to spotlight “people reworking the visual language of football from the inside out, not just using it as an aesthetic.” While this year’s festival cast a spotlight on emerging designers like AG Fits and Yourhoneymoone, hailing from elsewhere in the UK, it's a legacy with a precedent on Merseyside. Independent fashion designers in Liverpool, like Nadia Atique and Kayleigh Walmsley, have previously garnered attention for fusing the city’s football legacies with their designs, creating pieces that put fandom on fashion’s radar. With both Premier League clubs, Liverpool FC and Everton FC, commanding fierce local support, matchday attire has also fused with street style, with sportswear and outerwear emerging as the heroes.
Photographer Rob Bremner captures the genesis of this trend, documenting how the influence of European Away days pushed out the jeans and Marco Polo jumpers that defined terrace fashion in the late 1970s. Berghaus jackets and fluorescent shellsuits entered the wardrobes of football fans in the 1980s and 1990s. Travelling fans also brought back styles like the adidas Spezial, a shoe originally made for handball that quickly became a terrace staple, recognised for its versatility. The Spezial range, and the modern direction it has taken under adidas Originals, is a direct continuation of that culture, celebrating terrace heritage through a contemporary lens.
Sportswear-as-casualwear continues to define Liverpool’s style, with football fans dictating popular Scouse street style through their tastes — as McAssey puts it, “the football crowd have always cared about how they look [...] it’s a big part of the city’s DNA.” Such affinity for sportswear has bred success for homegrown brands like Montirex and Everton kit suppliers, Castore. While most records of the trend focus on Liverpool’s male football faithful, Merseyside’s own Mel C, recently seen fronting JW Anderson’s latest Loafer Bag campaign, gave it a female face in the 1990s with her signature “Sporty Spice” athleisure and open devotion to Liverpool FC.
The brand-conscious aesthetic defining Liverpool’s fans is also reflected among players. During the cash-rich early Premier League years of the 1990s, when footballers became celebrities, a group of Liverpool players, including Jamie Redknapp, David James and Jason McAteer, became known as “the Spice Boys”, a pejorative shorthand for a new kind of footballing fame. Goalkeeper James even modelled Armani underwear, famously missing a club training session to fulfil modelling commitments in Milan, as The Athletic reports, while the group’s infamous all-white Armani suits worn before the 1996 FA Cup final cemented their place in footballer fashion folklore. More recently, former Everton striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin was dubbed “Fashion’s Number 9” by GQ in 2022, after gracing the cover of Arena Homme+ in a pair of provocative skirt-like shorts, and being spotted at New York Fashion Week alongside then-team mate Tom Davies in 2020.
“There’s a rich, grassroots culture in Liverpool: people making, designing, collecting, and reinterpreting football through fashion, art, and community projects.”
Predictably, the Red side has spearheaded this shift most prominently in a city overrepresented in sports and entertainment. Yet, such creative experimentation has been driven from the bottom up by both players and fans until recently. Liverpool FC was the first in Merseyside to adopt club-approved apparel collaborations. In 2013, 2017 and 2019, they partnered with local independent label Love Follow Conquer, known for high-street pieces inspired by the club’s legacy. The club established a global fashion partnership in 2018 by collaborating with Levi’s – players reimagined the signature Trucker jacket alongside street artist AKSE.
Liverpool Women’s winger Shanice Van Der Sanden fronting SEASON zine issue 10 further highlighted the city’s style/sport connection. In 2023, the club’s capsule collection with Converse cast a new generation of fashionable, culturally engaged Scouse fans, including Filipina-Scouse singer Rain Castillo, to offer a hopeful projection of merchandise dedicated to a new wave of fans beyond the white, male and British football mainstream. While such campaigns can feel sporadic, they reflect how Liverpool FC has leveraged fashion as a vehicle for hyperlocal culture marketing. Punchy campaigns capture the tone, “We are Liverpool”, they proclaim with “football club” left unsaid, because the city and the team are one and the same. Nike has taken note, naming its relaunched Air Max 95 “110s” after a term lifted straight from Scouse slang. It’s a fitting tribute to the city’s obsession, where fans have been known to queue for over 15 hours to get a pair, but also a reminder of how that authenticity can be mined from the outside.
Independent creatives across Liverpool embed the city’s spirit through their work, forging a storytelling power that’s impossible to ignore. The co-founder and managing director of creative studio All Our Friends and grassroots football team Sefton Park Rangers (SPR), Jake Gerard Nolan, drives two major cultural players in Liverpool’s creative football scene. Fashion retailer SEVENSTORE sponsors SPR and their flagship store sits in the Baltic Triangle, a once-industrial patch where Toxteth meets the city centre, now alive with independent creatives, coffee spots and street art, that’s also home to All Our Friends. They were the team behind Liverpool FC and adidas’s 2025 third-kit campaign featuring Scouse actor James Nelson Joyce, who took new signing Hugo Ekitike on a tour of Liverpool. The reaction online says it all, with comments like “I love this club, I love this city!!!” and “So good! ” racking up likes for their hits of local pride.
Model and football fan Thea Howarth, who walked in the fashion presentation at GYKO festival, grudgingly credits Liverpool FC for inspiring Everton FC’s more recent ventures into fashion collaborations. “As a Blue, it pains me to say it,” they admit, “But Liverpool’s partnership with adidas has definitely brought a revival of football fashion culture to the city. I would even buy the tracksuit and third kit if I were that way inclined.” Collaborations with Nottingham-based merchandise brand Art Of have allowed Everton FC to compete with Liverpool on a style front. “The uptake’s been slower but the collaboration gives fans a chance to show their allegiance while moving away from [wearing] jerseys,” Howarth notes. In October 2025, Everton FC also unveiled a tie-up with Anti Social Social Club and Fanatics, signalling a new direction for merchandise and brand identity, and a new global partner in Fanatics. A move which may prove popular with younger fans like Howarth, who seek stylish ways to show their club allegiance. Yet, with both of Everton FC’s collaborations premiering in 2025, the Blues remain a few strides behind their rivals in red.
While locality and nostalgia are popular narratives driving Liverpool FC’s merchandise and creative campaigns, these themes also risk stunting the growth of the scene. Endlessly revisiting heritage can create a lens locked on the past, ignoring the new faces in the frame. In LFC and adidas’s 2025/26 heritage-inspired drops: both DNA and Urban Purists lack women’s pieces entirely, while Terrace Icons includes just three women’s pieces out of nineteen. Recognising the forming representation gap, McAssey also founded GIRLFANS in 2015, a zine and online platform run alongside Hitchen dedicated to spotlighting the style of women in the stands. McAssey’s dedication to seeing beyond the mainstream was also a driving force in the decision to create GYKO. “Get Your Kits Out is bringing in influences from grassroots women’s football, streetwear, music and design, but it’s not nostalgic; it’s progressive.”
Independent women-led brands are also taking on the mantle, reframing football culture on their own terms. Jess Latham, creator of Hot Goal Summer, was inspired by the culture of her Aigburth-based small-sided team of the same name to create a collection of everyday lifestyle wear inspired by women’s grassroots football culture. “It's for the communities that have been and still are being told no. Whether by PE teachers, lads in the playground, men at the pub or the FA,” she explains. “Sportswear is definitely something I want to explore in the future, but for now, this collection sets the tone and identity of HGS: playful, inclusive, and rooted in our football culture.” The range of drawstring sports bags, caps and T-shirts, emblazoned with the HGS logo, launched in the GYKO Festival market.
Thea Howarth at Get Your Kits Out Festival. Credit Ella McConville
Jess Latham (right) at Get Your Kits Out Festival. Credit Ella McConville
While Latham has carved out a niche aimed at a demographic overlooked by mainstream football-inspired apparel, she remains a one-woman operation, working without the infrastructure or investment enjoyed by the heavyweights she seeks to disrupt. It’s a climate that makes achieving influence on a larger scale a challenging feat. This, perhaps, is emblematic of a wider theme among the artists featured at GYKO Fest: the drive and ability to create exciting work often undercut by limited resources.
Pioneers like Hitchen and McAssey are redefining Liverpool’s creative football scene, pushing its boundaries and transforming it from a traditionally male-centric space into one that welcomes a broader, more diverse community of contributors. An ethos evident from McAssey’s focus on platforming women’s grassroots teams at GYKO, doubtlessly bolstered by the increasing popularity of women’s football. Goodison Park’s transfer to Everton’s women’s team in light of the Toffees’ new home in Hill Dickinson is perhaps emblematic of what the creative football scene needs next: ambitious investment with a view to driving onward momentum and preserving heritage.
“As a Blue, it pains me to say it, but Liverpool’s partnership with adidas has definitely brought a revival of football fashion culture to the city.”
The potential of Liverpool’s burgeoning creative football scene is clear with small-scale independents creating standout moments digitally, via GIRLFANS’ digital archive and All Our Friends’ LFC campaign, and IRL with events like GYKO. For now, the scene feels scattered yet electric — its biggest names thriving through collaborations across and beyond the city. What’s emerging, however, is a culture unafraid to wear its roots on its sleeve: practical, expressive, proudly local.
For young talent, the temptation to gravitate towards existing powerhouse cities remains. “Places like London and Manchester offer a wider range of creative opportunities,” says Howarth. The next step is continued investment from brands to support the talent in the region. A positive step in this direction has emerged through schuh's partnership with Liverpool City Council to create a supported internship, a role enabling young people to gain experience in retail. Additional programmes with a design or creative focus may be future progress indicators. The challenge ahead isn’t inventing something new, but giving what’s already here the visibility and investment to grow on its own terms. If GYKO is any indication, that future is already taking shape.