RÆBURN’s collaboration with Umbro began in the archive, working with original England football shirts spanning 1996 to 2010 — a period carrying some of the most memorable moments, identities and visual codes in modern English football.

Rather than reproducing those pieces, RÆBURN took a more radical approach.

Original Umbro England shirts were selected, deconstructed and physically RÆMADE into new garments. That initial experimentation then became the blueprint for a wider collection, with the designs replicated using recycled and organic materials.

It created a model that sits at the heart of the RÆBURN approach: use remaking to prove the idea, responsible materials to scale it, and design to connect the two.

Its archive contains garments that are more than products. They are connected to particular tournaments, players and moments, and to the collective memories of the people who watched them.

For this project, original England shirts from 1996 to 2010 became the starting material. Importantly, the shirts were selected for their cultural significance rather than simply their aesthetic qualities.

That provenance gave the materials an unusual value.

The challenge for RÆBURN was therefore not simply to redesign an England shirt. It was to work with garments already carrying history, emotion and recognition — preserving enough of that identity to make the source visible while being confident enough to fundamentally change it.

England’s familiar palette remained visible throughout, but the original visual hierarchy had been disrupted. It created something deliberately unexpected: unmistakably Umbro and unmistakably England, but equally unmistakably RÆBURN.

And then came a second challenge: how could an idea born from scarce archive pieces be translated into something that could reach a much wider audience?

Once the creative language had been established through the deconstruction of original England shirts, those ideas could be translated into reproducible garments using recycled and organic materials.

Details, compositions and constructions discovered through remaking could be studied, refined and replicated, allowing the character of the original RÆMADE work to carry through into a collection designed for broader production and global distribution.

This created an important relationship between craft, responsibility and scale.

RÆMADE allowed us to experiment without compromise, using existing garments to discover an original creative proposition. Recycled and organic materials then provided a route to reproduce that proposition for a much larger audience.

Football has always been about much more than what happens on the pitch — it creates identity, conversation and community. We wanted the wider project to reflect that same energy.

At the RÆBURN studio, we hosted football matches that transformed our own working environment into a place for people to play, meet and participate.

The same space in which garments were being researched, deconstructed and remade became somewhere football itself could be experienced, bringing together craft, creativity and community under one roof. The project extended further into London with an event at KICK, creating another opportunity for football, fashion and the wider creative community to intersect.

These weren't simply moments surrounding a product launch. They extended the creative proposition into culture, allowing people to encounter the collaboration through product, place and participation.

The design language developed through the original RÆMADE England pieces was translated using recycled and organic materials, creating products that could be distributed globally while retaining the thinking and visual identity established through the initial experimentation.

In London, the collection was presented at Harvey Nichols alongside a dedicated installation. The ambition was to create a world around the collaboration - one that could communicate the thinking, materiality and cultural references behind it.

Retail became another piece of the creative system: an opportunity to translate an idea from garment to environment, and from environment to audience.

The Umbro collaboration demonstrates an important part of what RÆBURN can bring to established global organisations: the ability to identify unrealised creative value, prove an idea through experimentation, and develop a credible route to scale.

The project feels particularly relevant because it proposed a different relationship between archive, responsibility and scale. Original England shirts became the raw material for experimentation, those experiments became new Remade garments and in turn established a design language that could then be translated using recycled and organic materials and taken to a global audience.

Around them, retail installations and cultural events created a community through which the idea could be experienced rather than simply purchased.

The project brought together heritage, innovation and scale without losing the character of the original RÆMADE proposition.

For RÆBURN, that remains a powerful model for working with global organisations today:

Start with what already exists. Use making to discover what it could become. Then build the system that allows the idea to scale.