The fashion of team passion

Columnist Paul Lukas scrutinizes the trends and minutiae of sports aesthetics, from square-neck jerseys in hockey to the impact of frills in Olympic figure skating.

By King Kaufman

Feb. 19, 2002 | A certain writer for a certain online magazine who often yammers on about teams' outfits in his sportswriting had an idea for a column about uniforms. He thought he'd follow trends and changes, critique the fashion. He figured it'd be interesting.

And he was right. It's fascinating. Problem for this poor hack was that someone was already writing such a column for the Village Voice, and doing a far better job of it than our hero had been planning to do.

Paul Lukas, 37, has been writing Uni Watch monthly for the Voice since 1999. He also writes about product and brand design, mostly for business magazines, pens a travel column for Money magazine and writes about food and music.

On his Web site, Inconspicuous Consumption, Lukas examines the details of product design that most of us ignore. The site currently features a consideration of Heinz EZ Squirt Blastin' Green Ketchup. "One thing you might not realize, because it doesn't appear to have gotten much attention," he writes, "is that the new ketchup's official color, as listed on the package, is not green -- it's Blastin' Green." His musings were collected in a book, "Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the Everyday to the Obscure," in 1997.

Lukas, a Long Island native who graduated from SUNY-Binghampton with a political science degree that he says has had "approximately zero impact on my life," calls himself "an all-purpose minutiae fetishist," concerned with "the details that other people overlook." Recent Uni Watch columns have dealt with the history of stirrup socks and facial hair in baseball, changes in boxing glove color and the use of American flags on uniforms.

The day he talked to Salon by telephone from Brooklyn, where he lives, he was working on an article about a vintage Scotch tape dispenser.

Where did you get the idea for the column?

I've written a lot in the nonsports realm about brands and brand histories and product design. Writing about uniform design is a lot like writing about brand design, except the brand is a team.

Team loyalty is a very special and specific kind of brand loyalty. In fact, in a lot of ways, it's the most passionate kind you can find. If you're loyal to a particular brand of cereal or adhesive tape, you have a loyalty to the brand image and maybe the logo, but you also believe that the product has a certain level of quality. If the quality went downhill, you'd say, "OK, well, I had an affection for this brand but they've blown it."

With teams, the quality changes all the time -- players retire, players change teams, they get traded, whatever -- so the quality of the brand, the content of the brand, is always changing, but we stay loyal to it anyway. We are totally loyal to that logo, that design, and that uniform, regardless of who's wearing it. I'm sort of fascinated by that kind of relationship and that kind of bond that sports fans have.

Also, what kid doesn't grow up dreaming of wearing a major league baseball uniform or a hockey uniform or the uniform of whatever sport you dream of being a part of? When I was in Little League, I would make sure that my baseball stirrups were just so and all that kind of stuff. It appeals to the detail-oriented nature that I have. I do a lot of detail-oriented writing, and applying that to sports meant coming up with the concept for a uniform column. I could have done it for a design magazine and treated it as a design column that just happens to be about sports, but I felt really strongly that I wanted it to be taken seriously as a legitimate sports beat, legitimate sports journalism.

A lot of people were surprised that I could sustain it, that I could do a monthly column about uniform design. Frankly, I could do a weekly if they'd give me the space.

Yeah, I was going to say, there's plenty to write about.

Like just a few days ago, the Indians announced a new alternate uniform and cap for the upcoming season, and their new cap is not going to have Chief Wahoo on it. And it happens that next football season the Redskins are using a new helmet that isn't going to have the Indian on the helmet. So there's a trend right there: Finally, after all the people saying you shouldn't use Native American symbolism and blah, blah, blah, it's interesting that these are both happening in the same year. There's no shortage of developments to write about.

Who are you picturing in your head when you're writing? Who's your reader?

Next page: I feel like I've had a fairly intimate relationship with the Mets' brand for most of my life