Are the New Miami Marlins Uniforms a Fashion Hit or a Miss?

The Miami Marlins, from left, Ricky Nolasco, Logan Morrison and Hanley Ramirez unveil their new uniforms and logos, Friday, November 11, 2011 at the Marlins new stadium

A baseball team’s uniform is like a wedding gown. Or a quinceanera dress.

Wait, wait, wait….bear with me a moment. This isn’t as stupid as it sounds.

Both the baseball uniform and the special event dress may at first glance appear to be only about fashion (in the case of the baseball uniforms, ‘fashion’ = sales), but both are actually all about tradition. Having said that, from a fashion perspective I gotta tell you that orange is a hot colour right now, so the new Miami Marlins alternative uniforms have that going for them.

Are the New Miami Marlins Uniforms a Fashion Hit or a Miss?

That’s not to say that they were aiming to be au currant with the 2012 spring fashion shows (staged in fashion capitals around the world September and October); it’s just that how can you NOT be in sync living here in trend-savvy SoFlo?

But there is a place and a time to be fashion-forward, to give the visual zeitgeist a little nudge in a new direction, but who really wants to see that on the diamond? Baseball uniforms have always been about tradition more than fashion, and it’s important to keep that up year on year.

That’s the problem with the rebooted look… its well-intentioned “newness” is unhinged and untethered from any regional heritage – or any visual reference at all to an old franchise that has won two World Series. Fashion can’t exist without some meaning, some function and some back story. So it’s all a miss for me I’m afraid.

And I suppose one could argue that both are also about branding, but that seems awfully cynical. Toward fashion I mean. The morphing of the Marlins? Now that is allllll about branding.

The change from the Florida Marlins to the Miami Marlins might be interpreted as an attempt to rub against some of the magic of the Magic City, with all its celebrity gloss. The M logo – trimmed in orange, yellow, silver and blue – is certainly distinctive in baseball, but in the rest of the world it looks like a metropolitan sign guiding tourists to the subway system. If those “M’s” popped up around SoFlo I would assume that we were just trying to guide Gay Pride tourists toward Tri-Rail (you wouldn’t really need to speak English or Spanish to figure that one out).

But here’s the thing: the new uniforms have real ‘hanger appeal” and might well be the new uniform on the streets surrounding the new yet-to-be-branded ballpark in Little Havana. Cynical, maybe, but there’s nothing to say that baseball uniforms can’t look good. It’s just a shame that this year (of all years) the Marlins didn’t inject just a little tradition into their uniforms.

I’m guessing that was the whole idea.

As an aside… while we’re complaining about the focus on fashion with the 2012 Marlins uniforms, we should note that we’re no innocent party. If you click the images of the new Marlins jerseys you’ll be taken through to a sales page. Hey, we may be complaining but we still have a strong capitalist spirit, and we’re not averse to making a little scratch. Free shipping before Turkey Day, guys.

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Are the New Miami Marlins Uniforms a Fashion Hit or a Miss?

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