With stores worldwide, celebs proudly wearing their badge and shirt sales rocketing, the French side have kick started a revolution in football and fashion. It all started by looking at culture. 

Paris Saint Germain’s New York store looks more like a designer flagship than a football club shop. The mannequins frozen mid-volley are the only real giveaway that this isn’t your regular Fifth Avenue boutique.

The Parisian side opening the world’s largest club shop 3,600 miles away from their Parc des Princes stadium, in a country where football only ranks fourth in the list of national sports, would’ve seemed like a wildly leftfield move a decade ago. Today it reveals how closely the beautiful game has become intertwined with global fashion, with PSG at the centre of a retail revolution.

In Britain at least, football’s relationship with style goes back decades. From the 1970s onwards, along with nightclubs, the terraces would be where young Working Class men had the opportunity to show off expensive designer clothing to peers and rivals in an ongoing game of one-upmanship. Eventually the different trends, looks and labels seen at football convened into one all-encompassing tribe, the Casuals, whose influence on global style since has been seismic. Just ask adidas, Stone Island or Burberry, all of whom made their way into the public consciousness through trends started at football. 

It’s only been in the past decade that the clubs themselves have realised the commercial potential of this association. Culture made football fashionable, while the clubs’ own merchandise lagged pitifully behind the curve. All that began to change however when Paris Saint Germain announced a string of surprise collaborations in 2018, first with Nike’s basketball brand Jordan, and then Japanese streetwear legends A Bathing Ape, signalling a new era of street-aware clubs actively seeking cultural clout through collabs and content. Juventus x Palace and Arsenal x 424 followed closely behind. 

Then came the big brands. Loewe nodded to the growing success of the women’s game by featuring Megan Rapinoe in a campaign, kicking off a wave of high fashion interest that, for better or worse, included Jack Grealish x Gucci and Balenciaga football boots. When French hero Kylian Mbappe starred in 2024’s Dior x Stone Island campaign, it felt like a final closing of the loop between football, high fashion and culture – an act decades in the making.

Nowadays you’ll be hard pushed to find a club that isn’t leaning into fashion and streetwear in a big way. Even League 2 club Newport County recently made news by appointing trainer collector and lifelong fan Neal Heard as Creative Director. 

What does this tell us about culture?

PSG were the first football club to truly understand the power of cultural clout. With their groundbreaking Jordan and BAPE collabs, they spoke directly to a new generation of urban football fans who were also into basketball and streetwear, and whose global influence had until then been overlooked by clubs. Having the vision to look beyond their own category and embed themselves in culture opened up a far bigger market than football teams are ordinarily able to reach, crossing territories and categories. The results speak for themselves. In 2011 PSG averaged around 50,000 shirt sales per yer. The club says that number is now more than a million. They have not won a trophy outside of the mid-sized French league in that time. 

The movement PSG kickstarted is now in full steam: the global football apparel market size is estimated to grow by $3.66 billion from 2025-2029. Models wear football shirts on the runway at Fashion Week. It’s a trend that’s unlikely to reverse. 

By transforming a football club into a lifestyle brand that blends luxury, streetwear and sport, Paris Saint Germain joined a long lineage of revolutionaries who made the world fall in love with Parisian culture and changed the course of fashion. And they did it without anybody even noticing. 

Pay attention to the overlap: Often it’s in the gaps between cultural niches where the opportunity lies. The football stand as the fan’s catwalk created an opportunity for football clubs. So, where’s your brand’s catwalk? Where is your brand already, but more importantly unexpectedly, showing up? Note when you find those moments of overlap, tread carefully to ensure your brand adds to what’s already there, rather than blatantly commoditising culture (at the expense of the organic moment).

Provocations

• Reframe to resize: “If you don’t like it, change it” has been a mantra for many for decades, but why can’t we apply the same mindset to the categories our brands are in? PSG were by no means a minnow, but they also were not a football club with heavy success or recognition outside of France or football super fans. So they made a decision to reframe, from being in the business of football to being in the business of fashion – and rapidly resized their total addressable market in the process. If your brand’s in a mid-table shootout, how could you reframe it and create a league of one?
• Collabs out of category: Maybe you don’t want to, or can’t, run a full rebrand. You could still look for collaborators outside of your category who could give you cultural distinction, halo effect, and a new community to market to. It’s important to note though that we think you should avoid thinking about this in purely rational terms; if you’re a car brand, bringing in a designer for the interiors of a new nameplate is a bit pedestrian. Think Snoop and Martha. Gordon and Selena. Gucci and Flock Together. So go wild, or go home.

To unlock more insights, email discover@culturelab.co 

^{(Sources: CultureLab CultureIndex, April 2025)}