On February 17, a few days after announcing to Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) that he would leave the club this summer, and thereby the French championship, Kylian Mbappé was in Nantes, for a new meeting of Ligue 1. For his last in front of the public at the Beaujoire stadium, the striker was able to show off all his class, on and off the field. Scorer in the second half, he had in fact started the match on the sidelines, crampons in hand, down jacket on his back.
Since it is rare to see Mbappé on the bench, and therefore to see him in a down jacket, let’s start with the fashion question that is tearing the planet apart, sending everyone back to their own little chauvinism. Who invented the down jacket? For Australians, no doubt, it is the Australian mountaineer George Finch, in 1922. For the Americans, it is not Finch, but the American adventurer Eddie Bauer, in 1936. For the Germans, it is the German Klaus Obermeyer, in 1947. Our opinion? The down jacket was obviously invented by the French mountaineer Lionel Terray in the 1950s. End of the debate.
Regarding Kylian Mbappé’s down jacket, we have at least some certainties. This one is made in China, flocked on the left chest with a Middle Eastern sponsor, Qatar Airways, and stamped on the right chest with a perfectly American logo, that of Air Jordan, a subsidiary brand of Nike. This iconic silhouette, called “Jumpman”, is inspired by a photo of Michael Jordan taken in 1984 for Life magazine. The photographer, Jacobus Rentmeester, asked the basketball player to perform a dunken using the grand jet technique of classical dancers.
On his way to his sidelines, Kylian Mbappé holds fluorescent green crampons reminding us that black football boots have become a rarity on the pitch and that the origin of this erasure is less recent than we might believe… In 1970, the German brand Hummel sought to enter the English market and offered local star Alan Ball the chance to wear a unique white pair in exchange for 2,000 pounds. He accepts and wears it, under the stunned gaze of the other players, during the Charity Shield at Wembley. Successful publicity stunt. The hegemony of black begins for the first time.
In the color department, let us finally note the presence in the image of a yellow and green frame, the official colors of FC Nantes. A nod to the Brazilian selection? Nothing to see. When the club was created in 1943, one of the founders, the man named Jean Le Guillou, proposed adopting yellow and green because they were the colors of the jacket worn by the jockey who rode his horse Ali Pacha… A because of a horse, the Nantes players are therefore nicknamed the “Canaries”. In terms of animal nicknames, know that Kylian Mbappé was nicknamed “Donatello” by his teammates because of his supposed resemblance to the Ninja Turtle…
