“They used to be refined shirts and now they have become fashionable sports shirts,” says Brian Borghart about the development of the Oranje jersey. In 1894, the Dutch national team played its first international match and in those first years the team wore white outfits with red-white-blue stripes. The Dutch team only played in an orange colored shirt for the first time in 1907.
Market for worn shirts
“I wanted to make a book from my collection,” says Erik van Goor as one of his motivations for collaborating on ‘Het Oranjeshirt’. The 56-year-old collector from Huizen started his collection in 1994. At the time, he was doing an internship at a law firm in Washington. “Friends sent me a replica of an Orange shirt that summer. Not much later I discovered that there is also a market for match-worn shirts.”