The replacement of the traditional red and white St George’s Cross with a multicoloured one on Nike’s design for the Euros England shirt became such a hot topic in March that the prime minister got involved. The leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, called for the kit to be scrapped. But a new exhibition shows that England shirts, and the insignia on them, have been interpreted in multiple ways since the 1950s.

Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion, at Ambika Gallery in the University of Westminster, tells the story of Manchester-based brand Umbro. As the official outfitter of England from 1954 to 2012, the national team’s shirts are a key part of the exhibition, including a 2011 shirt designed by Peter Saville, the influential graphic designer famous for creating imagery for Factory Records in the 80s and redesigning the Burberry logo more recently. On it, the cross was purple. Yet there was no backlash.

The exhibition also features pictures of the red England kit worn when the team won the World Cup in 1966 (Umbro made the England and German kits), the blue pixilated design from 1990 that was never worn by the England team but became famous for its role in New Order’s World In Motion video, and a running vest with a red rose in the centre, from 1959. There are also more fashion-forward interpretations of the England shirts thanks to collaborations between Umbro and designers and brands including Palace, Kim Jones and Paul Smith, as well as the Saville design.

The curator, Andrew Groves, says the broad range of these items demonstrates how “the idea of what Englishness is is constantly being revised”.

He adds: “For example, the England rose is actually the Tudor rose, which is about uniting Lancaster and York together. People are constantly playing with bits of iconography and making them modern.”

Groves believes the reaction to Nike’s St George’s Cross was caused by a lack of explanation. “They didn’t have a narrative [of] ‘we’ve done this because of x’,” he says. “With Saville, they talked about how they took the colours from the crest, putting all three together to give this purple colour. It’s about the idea of Britain as a really multi-diverse country,” he says.

In fact, says Groves, designing an England shirt that will be approved of by England fans is a perennially tricky proposition. “Do you want to keep them happy but move them on? I think that’s a difficult thing to do, especially when it seems like it’s only every [two] years when people are engaged and [when you consider] how problematic Englishness has become.”

The exhibition goes beyond England shirts and demonstrates how collaboration, now par for the course between sports and fashion brands, has long been key to Umbro, a brand founded by brothers Harold and Wallace Humpreys in Wilmslow in 1924. Their first one was a tennis shirt in 1955, when they worked with Teddy Tinling, the world’s leading tennis gear designer. It was worn by four Wimbledon champions.

More recent collaborations are also featured. There’s an Ajax shirt remixed by Dutch streetwear label Patta, a Palace football shirt featuring a flyer from Milton Keynes nightclub The Sanctuary, a Supreme football and a pair of highly prized Off-White x Umbro sneakers made by Virgil Abloh.

While Umbro is now somewhat overshadowed by behemoths such as Adidas and Nike, it had an outsized influence on football kits during the 20th century. They outfitted teams for Brazil, Germany and Scotland, and clubs including Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool and Manchester United. “Really early on they realised that if they aligned themselves with winning teams, they could get the glory of that team,” says Groves. “Sometimes they had both teams in the FA Cup final wearing Umbro. It didn’t matter who won, Umbro could say that they won.”