MILAN — “Let’s be honest — who needs another collaboration? Nobody, and that’s coming from one who has lived through and witnessed many of them.”
Leave it to Cristiano Fagnani to indeed introduce a collaboration, but on his own unconventional terms. A Nike veteran for two decades, Off-White’s chief executive officer since 2013 tuned in on Zoom to talk about the brand’s first soccer kit, designed with Puma for the AC Milan team.
“Collabs are kind of a tired formula, unless there’s a wider scope, purpose and higher ambition,” said Fagnani, underscoring that the three parties joined forces for a project aimed at going beyond mere merchandising purposes.
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The fourth kit launching on Friday is part of the bigger collaboration between Off-White and Milan’s storied club, which began in 2022, when the brand founded by the late designer Virgil Abloh debuted in the world of soccer and became the club’s official style and culture curator. The collaboration aimed to not only provide off-field uniforms for the team but also to support community activations and projects by AC Milan’s charity foundation Fondazione Milan, ranging from programs implemented in the Italian city’s outskirts; helping women in need in Nairobi and, next up, supporting youth in the Bronx, N.Y.
“It sounds like an abstract title but the meaning of our tie-up is all in there — we are a fashion brand but we like to see ourselves in a more complete and fuller way,” Fagnani said. “Along with AC Milan we had the mission to work together on projects that could add value to both brands.”
This time, they decided to weave them directly into the fabric of a soccer jersey, in a sort of a manifesto of style and inclusivity rich in both Off-White’s fashion insignia and nods to Black history.
Developed under the overarching concept of Dreamland, the jersey features the number 63 between Off-White’s signature quotation marks on its collar in a reference to the year that saw both AC Milan claim its first European Cup victory and Martin Luther King Jr. give the historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
The words “I support sport for change” — a recurring motto of the Off-White and AC Milan partnership — also appears under the number.
Available in two versions, the jersey is additionally rendered with Pan-African colors. An option has a black base fading into green, enriched by yellow logos and red detailing on the collar and cuffs; the other comes with a red base fading into green, with a monochrome AC Milan crest and yellow details.
Such elements add to pure Off-White codes. Covered with a dense, allover print of the brand’s famed arrows — here tweaked in their shape to be connected to each other to symbolically telegraph unity — each jersey features Off-White’s signature zip tie as well as the players’ surnames and the club’s nickname, “Diavoli,” in quotation marks, among others.
The kit will make its official debut on the pitch on Sunday during the Serie A championship match against Hellas Verona. A global launch was hosted for select partners in Milan on Thursday, when limited quantities of the kit were already available for purchase, before the launch at Puma and AC Milan physical stores and online and select retailers worldwide on Friday. The jersey is priced at 180 euros and 120 euros for the authentic technical version and the Replica looser fitted version, respectively.
Fagnani underscored that the launch intentionally coincides with Black History Month, as he sees the project as an opportunity to celebrate the cultural legacy and influence of the Black community in sports and fashion.
Overall, he said he sees sport — and soccer in particular — as “the stage to smooth all cultural and social frictions.”
“It’s the place of pacification, where all conflicts end with a handshake. And that happens at all levels, from my 14-year-old son playing in the street with his friends to professional competitions,” Fagnani said. “Sport is a representation of progress, because there are no barriers of social class, census or geography: all it counts is passion and talent. There’s space for everyone, it’s a great equalizer.…It’s naturally the most democratic and inclusive place and it gives us the platform to talk and engage with people on more profound themes and projects.”
In addition to underscoring its cultural aspect and natural ability to build communities around it, the CEO highlighted sports’ attraction in terms of visibility and media resonance. These factors contributed to fashion and luxury companies increasingly signing athletes as ambassadors as well as inking major partnerships in sports ranging from soccer and basketball to tennis and Formula 1.
“But for us, sport has always been in our DNA,” Fagnani said. “We exist in this ‘in-between’ zone: we’re between fashion and street; luxury and culture, and youth and heritage. We’ve been the carriers of a modern movement in fashion and youth culture. Virgil created a brand intended to be a blank canvas, to use to challenge the status quo and write any story, and it’s a bridge between the U.S., Europe and Africa.…Off-White exists for this reason and we couldn’t continue to exist if we wouldn’t put this equity at the core of the brand.”
The tie-up with AC Milan is not Off-White’s first in sports. For example, in 2016 it joined forces with skate brand Babylon LA, while in 2023 it teamed with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls for a capsule collection celebrating Abloh’s love of basketball and deep ties to Chicago. Sport was central also to the brand’s spring 2025 fashion show, Off-White’s first one in New York, which was staged on the waterfront community basketball courts of Brooklyn Bridge Park and paraded a collection melding African craft and futurism with American sportswear.
For fall 2025, the brand will be back in Paris, staging a show on March 6. “The return is intentional,” Fagnani said. “Decamping to New York has been a challenge we tasked ourselves with and that went super well. But to be back in Paris is very important: this brand was born to have a space within the industry, and to speak from inside. So to reclaim our slot is our way to tell we’re there, ready to tell another chapter.”
As for AC Milan, the partnership with Off-White further speaks to its brand elevation, which has accelerated since the Italian club was acquired in 2022 by RedBird Capital Partners, the American investment firm founded in 2014 by Gerry Cardinale.
As a result, the club also heightened its U.S.-centric focus. Most recently, it asked Tiffany & Co. to create the special trophy to be bestowed to inductees into its Hall of Fame as part of the celebrations of its 125th anniversary last year. Other initiatives marking the milestone included a collaboration with the New York Yankees, followed by another Off-White capsule collection released during Milan Fashion Week in September.
“We have a big advantage here, which is that we are based in one of the fashion capitals of the world,” said AC Milan’s chief commercial officer Maikel Oettle about the club’s relationship with fashion. “That credibility is further underlined by the fact that we were founded by an English tailor that moved to Milan to learn the traits of Italian tailoring,” he continued, additionally mentioning other tie-ups through the years, such as the deal with Dolce & Gabbana in the early 2000s.
“Fashion is obviously massively waking up to sports.…We’re trying to gain our edge by being authentic to that heritage. We have the luxury to go back into the archive and create products that are very credible and attractive and that play a lot with the history that we have. We don’t have to start trading these products and these narratives from scratch,” Oettle said.
The executive recalled how the project of bringing more fashion relevance through special kits started four years ago, and was propelled via partnerships with the likes of Paris-based label Koché and Los Angeles’ Pleasures. “This Off-White and Puma collaboration now was the logical, ideal pinnacle and the next move that we could do in terms of storytelling and magnitude of collaboration partner,” Oettle said.
“We’re very well aware that we are not just a football club, we’re also a social institution. When you have more than 500 million fans around the world, you have a responsibility not just to your community, but almost to society because the sample size is big enough so that the positives and negatives can move the needle,” he said. “We want to set a standard for others to follow and we want to do this across performance, culture and purpose. So being able in this collaboration to combine the culture and purpose pieces together by fighting for what’s right, which is celebrating Black excellence.”
More pragmatically, the fourth kits enable the club to diversify its audience. While the main red-and-black jersey and white away kit are long-lasting fans’ go-to choices, Oettle sees the third kit for Gen Zers and Millennials and the fourth one for fashion lovers.
The fourth jersey also allows the club to connect with fans in innovative ways, such as via activations in Rocket League and Fortnite. In this case, in Rocket League the jersey design has been transformed into car Decals and Wheels, set to debut in the popular sports-action game starting Feb. 21, while a custom Fortnite island takeover inspired by the collection will offer players the chance to explore and interact with the new designs.
“We’re trying to bring [people] into as many channels as possible in order to grow a fan base and to give them an AC Milan touch point in their daily life,” Oettle said.
