Fashion is in bloom at the World Cup as a G-Dragon collab arms the Taeguk Warriors with a unique look
2026.06.22 14:57
Before Korea kicked off against the Czech Republic on June 12 and against Mexico on Friday, the cameras caught the Taeguk Warriors warming up in something that did not look like a football jersey at all.
Spread across the back of the shirts was a daisy — white, pink and sky-blue — which happens to be the favorite flower of a person who has never played 90 minutes of professional football in his life: the singer G-Dragon.
The flower design is the house mark of Peaceminusone, the label that the K-pop idol founded with his stylist in 2016 and runs with his older sister.
The eclectic daisy-patterned jackets, which the Korean national football team players wore on their walk into the stadium in Guadalajara on Friday, paired with red knee socks, were also a unique look.
Sportswear behemoths such as Nike, Adidas and Puma release World Cup kits for the national teams they sponsor.
For Korea, Nike has been designing the Korean national football team's uniforms since 1996, and chose Peaceminusone this year to "combine the symbols of Korean football with modern details, making designs that both players and fans on the field can share the same sense of pride."
Nike has collaborated with seven brands for this year's tournament. France got the haute couture brand Jacquemus, while England got Palace, which traces its origins to sportswear centered around street skaters. Canada got Nocta, the label belonging to the rapper Drake. Korea got G-Dragon’s Peaceminusone.
The collection that resulted, “The Tigers of Asia by Peaceminusone,” is not the kit the team plays in — it is the pre-match wardrobe, the warm-up tops, track jackets and the lifestyle pieces that can be worn easily off the pitch as well.
What differentiates the Korean team's collaboration is not the design so much as the partner. Jacquemus is a fashion house; Palace grew out of skate videos. PeaceMinusOne is something else — less a fashion label than the distilled image of the quintessential K-pop idol, a brand that is, for all intents and purposes, G-Dragon himself. So where the other federations reached for fashion, Korea reached for K-pop, putting its national team in conversation not with a designer but with the country's most successful cultural export.
National team winger Hwang Hee-chan and Karina of the girl group aespa are the face of Peaceminusone’s World Cup campaign alongside G-Dragon, and the centerpiece sneaker, the Nike Cryoshot, is built on the bones of a 2010 Nike boot, the CTR360 Maestri II, reissued with a University Red swoosh. Released last Tuesday, the collection by Peaceminusone and Nike already sold out by this week on the Nike Korea website.
The sports brand's three decades of partnership with the national team means it has had many years to learn the country’s visual codes, and the actual match kits this summer show that Nike did its homework.
The home shirt is designed around the tiger — specifically as an ambush predator — in red and black, with a marled tiger stripe print worked into the fabric.
Red has long been the official home color of the Warriors. But the side's away kit, which made its tournament debut in the match against Mexico on Friday, is a lavender floral print, an apparent nod to the Korean national flower, the mugunghwa.
It is worth acknowledging that Nike inherited this design centered on tradition rather than inventing it, and perhaps the most distinct kit the team ever wore was from before Nike took over.
That kit belonged to Rapido, a domestic apparel brand under the Samsung C&T umbrella, and it is part of Korean footballing history that has faded with time. In October 1993, in the final qualifying round for the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Korea took the field against Iran in an all-red shirt carrying a band of white and red and blue and yellow saekdong — layered color stripes of the hanbok (traditional Korean dress) — across the left chest.
The press at the time praised Rapido’s design for looking like no other country’s kit. The saekdong design shirt lasted exactly five matches, the shortest run of any Korean uniform kit, before it was retired; in those five matches the team lived through the "Miracle of Doha," qualifying for the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. by the slimmest of margins after Japan drew with Iran in the last match of Asian qualifiers. For the finals themselves, Rapido switched the home shirt to white, on the old logic that Koreans are baeguiminjok, or "the white-clad people."
By the 1994 Asian Games, the saekdong had swelled to cover most of the front, picked up a collar and a comb-pattern sleeve. Rapido’s final design, in 1995, reverted to red with two black bars nodding to the trigrams of the Korean flag — and when Nike took the contract the following year, its first Korean shirt was essentially that same Rapido design with a new logo sewn on.
Rapido's instinct — that a shirt can carry a country’s history on it — is everywhere at this year’s World Cup.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, back at the tournament for the first time since 1974, skipped the team tracksuit entirely and walked through Houston Airport in tailored black suits cut with leopard-print panels, leopard pins and leopard luggage to match. The work of the Congolese designer Alvin Junior Mak, the suits were a literal interpretation of the team’s nickname, the Leopards, and of the national emblem, a leopard’s head flanked by an elephant tusk and a spear. The design went viral within the day, with social media talking of the look nonstop.
Others tried to put the history directly on the shirt — and ran into conflict with FIFA. Haiti, at their first World Cup in 52 years, commissioned a kit from the Colombian maker Saeta that tucked the Battle of Vertières — the 1803 fight that won Haitian independence — onto the lower right side, freedom fighters raising the flag. FIFA banned the design as too political, and Haiti played in a plain blue instead.
In another case, Egypt arrived wearing seven stars above the crest, one for each of their record seven African Cup of Nations titles, and were told to take them off; stars at this tournament indicate World Cup titles, and Egypt has never won one.
So which country has the best-looking kit? There doesn't appear to be a consensus. The Washington Post’s fashion writer gave the crown to South Africa's green and gold; Korea’s uniforms turned up on nearly every other list — Fox’s top 20 and ESPN’s picks — usually for the striking lavender away shirt that was quite unexpected, to say the least.
The spotlight at this World Cup has not stayed just on the pitch. As much as the players' kits are drawing the eye, fan fashion is having a moment of its own — and back home in Korea, that moment is being measured in searches and sales. Because the matches in this World Cup fall mostly in the morning, the after-work street-cheering crowd has migrated indoors — to offices and desks — and the clothes have followed.
The trend the industry has settled on is “blokecore,” the blurring of the team jersey into something you could plausibly wear to a company meeting: pique polos, embroidered detailing, a sporty cut to otherwise standard office attire. The domestic brand LF leaned on its preppy label Hazzys to chase the blokecore look, and the numbers proved it to be a smart move — Hazzys’ red-toned items rose about 30 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the brand.
Fashion platforms in Korea have seen the same trend. On Musinsa, searches for “football uniform” climbed more than 113 percent over the opening weekend of the World Cup; after Korea came from behind to beat the Czech Republic on June 12, searches for “national team uniform” multiplied sixfold, and at Musinsa’s Seongsu megastore, the jersey-marking service — where they press your chosen name and number onto the back — saw usage rise sixfold in a single day. On the commerce app Ably, products with “blokecore” in their names sold about 10 percent more, according to the app.
One thing is very clear: The World Cup has become an event where football itself and sportsmanship are not the only key players — fashion, looks and trends have also taken the pitch.
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