A jersey can mean many things to many fans. But, first of all, it is an identity. Representation. Language. One-sided fans don’t just see it as a color, they break it down, go deep. That’s why Wani likes to spend a lot of time designing jerseys. He sees it as a blank canvas to tell a story. “It has to be something that comes to us as a brief, and then we work on that brief,” he says. “It’s not like, OK, one day I wake up and put this on the national team. That’s where we go in as a design studio to make sure it’s not a literal brief, but also where it gets artistic. Abstract, but also sporty.”
But the IPL jersey, as it stands, is not artistic enough for several reasons. Here is Wani. “The design happens first and then the sponsor logos come in. I understand this because the sponsors are closed much later in the whole sequence. Since we don’t have control over half the things, what eventually happens is that what comes out is not something that we think is the best way to present a design.”
The space for building a narrative, therefore, should be in the background, but ‘it is also about business’. “You win some, you lose some.”
Here, Wani, who counts the Ambanis among his clientele, approached, referring to how his studio went about designing the Royals’ jersey in 2023. “They wanted something culturally rooted in Rajasthan, so we decided to create a geometric pattern using step wells (architecture used for agriculture and rainwater harvesting), something very famous in Rajasthan.” They also played around the jharoka, specific famous windows in palaces across the state.
The studio was happy with what they ended up with, but ‘you win some, you lose some’. He hopes that “we can standardize the colors on a jersey to say, ‘OK, let’s not have every logo with its own set of colors.’ What does an F1 team do? They have so many logos, but it’s standardized in a way that it has one color, no matter what your brand guidelines say.
