Indeed. It looks stupid, but I can see what they liked in it. It’s different. Sometimes that’s all that matters.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that there are people in Germany that would try something like this. The SWAT team in Saxony knew exactly, for example, what they were doing when they had their logo embroidered onto the seats of their new armed transport a few years ago (and had to remove them after a public outcry). I just don’t see that being the case here.
There’s also the source to consider; this is an especially bad look for Adidas, which has been Nazi adjacent in both the distant and much more recent past.
***cough*** Kanye ***cough***
It will be, the DFB and Adidas want to prevent copyists getting hold of the font to protect profit (it is the same with other football associations). They are often designed to include a logo within each character.
There will have been all kinds of approval stages to get to the final approved design including (highly probably) full visuals of the squad wearing them.
And Korean!
I remember like… 10 years ago? - there was K-Pop band selling jersey looking shirts in white and black that said “Wolf 88” on the back. Definitely would give someone the side eye if I didn’t know any other context.
Local Asian market I like to go to is called 888 Market - so they sound more like some spam caller than white supremacists. Got to see the lion dance this new year!
And what was considered subversive counter-culture 55+ years ago is different than today. I’ve seen album covers and sleeves from the past (80s? 90s?) use overt Nazi imagery in a subversive way (you could write a college course on Nazi design’s influence on counter cultures).
Huh, interesting. It looks vaguely Cyrillic.
Whether it is deliberate, accidental or otherwise, just stopping customers ordering a 44 shirt is not enough. The whole design needs to be ditched and a new font used, instead. That, in itself, might signal some acknowledgement of how bad this is, but is by far not the only reason for ditching it entirely.
Adding to Adidas’s woes.
I wonder if an AI model trained to see swasticas could be a useful tool.
I mean, that’s what’s happening. They’re redesigning the lettering
Oh? Ok. I actually read about this whole thing elsewhere and all it said was that they were restricting customers from customising their shirts with a 44.
No, they have committed to redesigning the 4 and looking at the other letters to make sure nothing else has slipped through.
That’s why I don’t get the fuss: this was handled about as maturely and grown-up as it could have been.
Someone made an unfortunate slip-up, it was caught and remedied. Nobody made any excuses and everybody immediately acknowledged that it was unacceptable. They stopped the delivery of any shirts with 4 in them as a stop gap measure and are going through the appropriate channels to change the typeface.
Except for some English tabloids everyone in this story did exactly what one would hope they would do.
That’s the problem, right there! It always is. 
… and those “44” shirts in the original font design which are already out there will become highly sought-after prize specimens 
(They’ll probably go especially well with a pair of golden sneakers from Trump.)
Buffon didn’t have that excuse, he was born in 1978, and he had already caused controversy earlier by quoting Mussolini. He apologised on both occasions, unlike Paolo di Canio and his Il Duce tattoos, but doubt remained for the rest of his long career.
Italy has a far right problem in football, Lazio aren’t called SS Nazio by other European football fans for no reason.
How the hell could you live in Germany, take even the most fleeting of glances at this design, and think it’s fine?
Lazio has always been the fascist team from Rome, my wife, who is Roman, said they’ve been shitheads since she can remember, and being a Lazio tifoso was one big red flag.
I always figured it was intentional, ironic and part of a punk/metal tradition of appropriating Nazi symbols for transgressive or subversive ends. This pose came via bikers who might not have been quite so ironic about it, and time has made a thin veil of irony, but there you have it. It was cute in the 70s. Simmons denies it and is no Nazi.
Thinking of Punk swastikas, you know. It’s a bit like how in Harry Potter the wizarding world’s bankers are hook-nosed goblins with Stars of David mosaics on the floor. Completely unintentional osmosing of cultural baggage into something by creators you’d never suspect of glib indifference to the history of their pose.
Given what we now know about J.K. Rowling, I’m thinking the second one maybe isn’t quite like the first.
I mean… maybe? But what lots of bands discovered by throwing around nazi imagery is that nazis eventually show up to fuck things up. Joy Division (among other bands) were quite shocked when people showed up and started Seig Heiling at their shows. Hell, in the Britain the white power movement made a conscious effort as early as 1978 to recruit out of the punk scene, which made Oi! one of the more controversial post-punk genre, since at least some bands either went full on nazi or refused to say either way where they stood.
The only band that seems to be able to keep using nazi (and other fascist, socialist, communist, and capitalism) symbols and make it work as a sort of larger political commentary seems to be Laibach… Everyone else seems to have to eventually actually clarify which side they’re on.
I mean look at this video… it’s straight up Wes Anderson meets Lemi Riefenstahl!
Also… their across the universe video from back in the day…
Oh no, he’s shitty for other reasons, but he’s no nazi! I’ll give him that. That is a low bar, though.
OH, I have no idea about any soccer players.
Yeah, if Tony Gonzalez started saying things like, “Hitler had some good ideas.” then I’d have to question the number choice. (I assume NFL players have some say in it.)
Maybe - but it always struck me as a design that looked cool scrawled on the back of your school notebooks.Simplified letter forms that an amateur would come up with because it looks cool.
In art criticism we tend to look at and find parallels, allegories, and sources the work might be derivative from - but often times it’s just something that looked or sound cool.
But as you mentioned and I mentioned upstream, Nazi imagery has been part of counter cultures in various forms for years, and that could have influence the design, even if just subconsciously.
Even Laibach sometimes confuses people, because they play it so straight. Especially if you have no prior context.
This image from the Opus Dei LP goes pretty hard on its own, but if you ever watch them in their videos they are - for lack of a better word - so god damn dorky about it that it’s hard to take them seriously. The lead singer’s scrawny body and that stupid hat are antithetical to fascist ideals - being a stark contrast to the message in some of the songs. IMO you have to be completely ignorant of the work to not realize they are satirizing fascists and authoritarian regimes -OR- really dumb to not realize they are making fun of you and instead “on your side”.
Though I’d note what you could do in 1987 and clearly be satirical political commentary, is a lot murkier today.
That does remind me - I do need to track down this book.
