For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Belgium’s Purple Devils are bringing surrealism to the pitch.
The workforce’s away jersey, designed in partnership with Adidas, is a blue and pink sample primarily based on the works of the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967), whose mind-bending work helped outline the surrealist motion. Genuine variations of the jerseys are on sale at Adidas for $150.
That is the fourth time that Belgium has opted to honor some aspect of the nation’s heritage by its away jersey design. On the 2016 UEFA European Championship, the athletes donned a jersey impressed by Belgium’s biking tradition; on the 2022 World Cup, they sported a design created in collaboration with the Belgian music competition Tomorrowland; and for the 2024 Euros, they pulled inspiration from Tintin, the iconic cartoon by the Belgian artist Hergé. In 2026, the workforce is placing its most high-design spin on the idea but.
‘This isn’t a jersey’
Once you consider Magritte, you doubtless image a inexperienced apple, a bowler hat, and a pipe.
Whereas Magritte dabbled in cubism throughout the early years of his profession, his most well-known works—most of which had been produced between the late Twenties and early ‘60s—blended lifelike scenes with sudden twists. Objects typically seem the place they shouldn’t be, as within the inexperienced apple superimposed atop the face of a well-dressed man in The Son of Man; or physics are deserted, just like the floating pedestrians in Golconda.
The jersey instantly calls out one well-known work, The Treachery of Photographs, which reveals a pipe captioned with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This isn’t a pipe”). On the neck of the jersey, a delicate script reads, “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” (“This isn’t a jersey”).
A number of frequent motifs emerge from Magritte’s portfolio and are taken up by the Belgium away jersey. His fixation on the afternoon and night sky lends a blue hue to a lot of his works, which is mirrored within the robin’s egg base shade of the jersey. Dozens of his items discover mirrored or repeated shapes—particularly spherical ones just like the apple, moon, or solar—which, within the jersey design, is reimagined as a sequence of pink and blue soccer balls.
In response to an outline from the Royal Belgian Soccer Affiliation, the small horizontal strains all through the sample mirror the bounds of a soccer pitch.
Whereas most international locations are likely to return to easy, color-blocked reinterpretations of their nationwide colours for World Cup jerseys, it’s not extraordinary for groups to take a extra outside-the-box strategy. This 12 months, for instance, Ghana’s home jersey takes inspiration from kente, a standard hand-woven textile, and France’s away jersey is impressed by the colour of the Statue of Liberty. Different groups have pulled pointers from jerseys of World Cups previous, together with Uruguay with its Thirties-inspired away jersey and the U.S. with its home “stripes” kit, impressed by a 2012 look that was likened to the e-book sequence The place’s Waldo?
In contrast with these designs, a lot of which nonetheless depend on a shade palette pulled from nationwide flags, Belgium’s look is pretty daring. As a substitute of instantly duping Magritte’s work, Adidas’s reimagining tastefully remixes it into a contemporary, vibrant print—and it’s seeming doubtless that the Purple Devils will likely be one of many best-dressed groups on the sphere.
