THEY SAY YOUNG PEOPLE’S OPPORTUNITIES ARE limited these days, but I met a French girl in the summer who pilots drones for a living. I don’t remember the careers officer at my school suggesting this as a possibility, thirtysomething years ago. (“Have you thought of forestry?” That’s what mine said to me. I hadn’t. I haven’t since, either. Maybe it’s not too late? We’ll always need trees, and whatever else they have in forests — dirt?)
We were standing in the garden of a château in Burgundy as the Parisienne droner explained her business to me. Most of her work, she said, as one of her anxiety-inducing gizmos hovered above us, was on fashion shoots, filming zippy videos for broadcast on social media.
I mention this only because what drew me to her was not her remarkable dexterity with a remote control, but her T-shirt. It was gold, with long sleeves, and I recognised it instantly as the latest replica away strip of Venezia FC, the Serie B football club. Not that I am some sort of sportswear trainspotter (it says “Venezia” on it, helpfully) but because in my job it behoves me to keep up to speed on fashion trends. That T-shirt, I knew, was the acme of street-style sophistication. This was the first time I’d seen one in the wild.
In my lamentable French — no one ever suggested international diplomacy to me as a potential career — Iexplained that the magazine I work for was running a story about the recent phenomenon of replica football kits as fashion statements, with her Venezia shirt as the exemplar. She seemed Gallically unimpressed by this, but conceded with an eye-roll that, yes, lots of people had commented on it already, and asked her where it was from and how to buy one.
“What’s crazy,” she said, “is I don’t even like le foot.” Well, yes. It is kind of crazy. Back in the Esquire workspace, I told this story to my colleague, Miranda Collinge. Snap, said Miranda. Or words to that effect. She too had recently spotted a girl in her twenties wearing a Venezia FC shirt. Her sighting, shortly after mine, came in a still more incongruous setting: outside the polar-bear enclosure at a wildlife park in the Highlands of Scotland. (Could this, by cosmic coincidence, have been the Coco Chanel of the drone community on another far-flung remote-piloting assignment? Miranda thinks not. I didn’t ask for further elaboration but apparently this second girl was “definitely Scottish”.)
It doesn’t happen often, so forgive my making a thing of it, but here at Esquire we felt we were on to something. The style zeitgeist was pulsing through our fingers with unusual force. What was going on? Why was the football strip of a second-division Italian team suddenly the must-have summer ’fit for chi
