How Red Star F.C. became a landmark on the suburb of Paris The first football club of the French city is not just sport: there are also integration and research for originality
Last Christmas, many thought about a football shirt as a gift to make. The interest in this market has grown a lot, and if choosing for those of the best clubs in the world - such as Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus - can be the easiest solution, there are those who choose to go further and look for more original uniforms - less related to the mainstream. Like the one of the Red Star F.C., the oldest team in Paris.
David Bellion is the brand manager of Red Star F.C., a former professional footballer (Manchester United, West Ham and Bordeaux), and believes that in modern football is important to find an own place outside the mainstream. In particular when we're talking about football jerseys aesthetics and off the pitch projects, such as those of the Red Star Lab - a cultural and artistic laboratory of the licensees of the Red Star Football Club, created in 2008 by Patrice Haddad - that allows many children to find their passion through practical activities. They are the same kids who used to go to the stadium to see the team of Seine-Saint-Denis, the district with an exaggerated production of football talents (such ad Mbappé, Kanté, Moussa Sissoko) but also with the highest poverty rate in France. This is where the Red Star F.C. works.
Can fashion be a way to spread your values through youngers and your local supporters?
We use not only fashion, but also music, art, anything that can attract young people. Our sponsor Vice has allowed us to be known in an aesthetic, superficial way, as it is an international reality. Especially since the jersey with Vice above has a great visual impact and makes it attractive, although for us it is not the most important thing. It was certainly important to use fashion to make us known, but it is just one of the many channels we use for our social goals. Fashion, design, photography are all means that we treat carefully and that we also use to develop the talents of young people who work with us. We carefully choose our stylists or photographers and we are pleased that after working with us, very often, they end up in large companies. And this applies to all the visual aspect of the Red Star: we pay attention to everything, the quality is maximum, and for the same reason we try to differentiate ourselves from the mainstream. We want to be an original club.
In wich sense?
I really like fashion, but at Red Star we want to have our own space, communicate with our audience. We are not interested in big merchandising: we want nothing but doing things well and following our principles. We like to stay in our niche and not follow a general culture, but to create our own. This is why we are very interested in independent realities such as nss, or sports collectives such as Calcetto Eleganza or Nowhere F.C. We are connected by a sharing of values and originality. We want a continuous replacement, to be original, to give a voice to young people, to ideas, whether they are fashionable or visual. But that doesn't change our social goals or our identity. That's always at the heart of it all, and that's why we wrote Romantic Football Club on our Instagram bio. We're an indie movie, not a blockbuster.
