European Fashion Heritage Association

Journal EFHA World

Object Voices / Introducing FILA Lines

02.06.2021
Italian fashionSportswear

The second voice from the FILA Museum Archive

Modern tailoring teaches us that an ordered system of lines on a suit is often synonymous with composed elegance: let’s think – just to give an example – of a pinstripe suit. For FILA SPORT, the same geometric motif informed the design of a new, fresh, unconventional collection.

In 1975, one year after the debut of the WHITE LINE tennis line, the designer Pierluigi Rolando modified a polo shirt designed for the Roman champion Adriano Panatta: he drew a grid of vertical and parallel lines on it. This apparently small addition gave life to a garment destined to make history: the shirt became the “Borg” polo shirt, named after Björn Borg, the Swedish tennis player who wore it on the playing fields. Borg’s handsome, sinuous body was enhanced by the stripes: thanks to his victories, the sporting codes proposed by FILA modified the global perception of the discipline, replacing the monotony of total white with a new attitude.

The stripes then became a recurring motif in the brand’s aesthetics, each time leading to different results: the minimal motifs of the WHITE ROCK and SNOW TIME garments, the rhythmic geometries of the swimwear AQUA TIME, the grit of the cross at chest height of the 1980s ‘Terrinda’ jumpsuit. All these examples allow us to shed new light upon the urban taste of the most recent collections: behind the simplicity of the graphic element hides the subversion of tradition, on and off the pitch and constantly on the line that delimits it.