Inside India’s Cricket Jersey: The Design Codes Behind The Blue

Blue was not always the colour of team India jersey. For the first three World Cups that they played, in 1975, 1979 and 1983, the colour of the jersey in which the team took to the grounds was white, almost indistinguishable in cut and colour from a Sunday club or a test fixture. This was mostly owing to the red ball and the sport's Victorian dress code permitting nothing else. It took Kerry Packer's breakaway World Series Cricket to prise coloured kit into the game. Following that, it wasn't until 1992 World Cup, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, that India finally got issued its first dyed shirt: the navy blue jersey striped at the shoulder in blue, green, red and white, with "India" rendered in pale yellow across the chest. In that tournament, Mohammad Azharuddin's side finished seventh out of nine in that tournament. The jersey, however, endured as an iconic template and would later make a comeback, almost sacramentally, as a retro reissue for Australia's 2020 tour.

What followed after was a decade of multitudinous experimentation. The 1994 Wills World Series introduced a yellow front panel that persisted, in various intensities, through the 1996 World Cup, hosted jointly by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It went on into 1999, when a diagonal yellow chevron bordered in black cut across an England-bound jersey. By the turn of the millennium in 2003, it was under a South African sky that fans saw the yellow expunged altogether from the jersey. Now, the tricolour appeared for the first time, as a slanted brushstroke across the chest, "India" stamped over it. The team advanced into the final, however, the cup was destined to go to the Aussies. Four years later, a pale, watered-down blue — perhaps the most ubiquitous of the jerseys so far — accompanied India's most chastening World Cup exit, ousted in the group stage by Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The Winning Blue, And A Shirt Made of Bottles

Redemption only arrived for who were now formally the "Men in Blue" in 2011. It was the era of MS Dhoni. The side of Captain Cool who were draped in dark blues at the Wankhede Stadium final — Sachin Tendulkar's solitary World Cup winners' medal, delivered in his home city — carried the tricolour down both its flanks, or sides, and "India" in saffron block letters across the chest, a modest recolouring of the preceding kit that nevertheless became, retrospectively, the most cherished jersey in the archive. Four years on, Nike turned sustainability into a talking point: the 2015 World Cup kit, worn in Australia and New Zealand — more prim, minimalist and athletic than any before it — was manufactured from an average of thirty-three recycled plastic bottles per set, an early gesture toward the circular economy from a sportswear giant. The following year brought a genuine first in international sport: India wore, for one match against New Zealand, jerseys printed on the reverse not with surnames but with their mothers' names, an unrepeated but much-discussed instance of the shirt as tribute rather than uniform.

Aaquib Wani And The Age Of The Ikat Tiger

The jersey's most consequential redesign, however, began in a boardroom. When Adidas displaced Nike as India's kit sponsor in 2023, in a deal reported at Rs. 350 crore over five years, the commission went to Aaquib Wani, a self-taught, Delhi-based designer of Kashmiri descent who had never played competitive cricket, and who had cut his teeth on album covers for a thrash-metal band before designing jerseys for Real Kashmir FC and the Rajasthan Royals. His ODI World Cup jersey, unveiled that September, replaced literal tricolour bands with an ikat-inspired pattern abstracted from the stripes of a tiger, India's national animal, woven in jacquard for a subtler, textured finish rather than a printed one. His Test jersey — the format's first to be sold commercially, and one that sold out within two days — borrowed, by Wani's own account, a sunburst graphic from Adidas's Argentina football kit, reworked in a considered shade of blue. The 2024 T20 World Cup jersey that followed folded in architectural arches drawn from Indian heritage monuments alongside a tricolour shoulder panel, distinguished from its ODI sibling by a single embroidered star rather than two — a quiet piece of sartorial semiotics marking one World Cup won against two.

Three gold stars stitched onto that 2020 retro reissue told the same story more plainly: 1983, the 2007 T20 World Cup, and 2011. Wani's designs went on to clothe both the men's 2024 T20-winning side and the women's team that lifted the 2025 ODI World Cup — the same kit, repurposed, doing double duty as the Champions Trophy jersey that year. What had begun as plain white flannel had become, by degrees of yellow, saffron, ikat and arch, something closer to a wearable constitution of the nation's cricketing memory, sold, worn, and occasionally wept over, by a crowd of a hundred thousand at the Narendra Modi Stadium alone.

Recurring Motifs And The Symbolism Therein

Over the years of experimentation and evolution, certain elements have survived almost all the redesigns. The tricolour, naturally, is the constant: saffron for courage and sacrifice, white for peace and truth and green for fertility and prosperity, usually deployed as a brushstroke on the jersey, or a chevron, a shoulder panel or a side seam, but rarely absent. Blue, adopted in 1992, has since solidified itself into the core lore of the team, a shorthand that says "Men in Blue." The star is the jersey's ledger: each embroidered mark denotes a global title won, so a shirt can be read, at a glance, as a scoreboard of cricketing history rather than a garment at all. Recent additions similarly work along similar allusions: Wani's tiger stripes gesture at India's national animal and, by extension, strength and vigilance; his sunburst nods to renewal and dominance, a motif imported from football but recorded for cricket; his monument arches root the kit in a civilisational continuity that predates the sport by centuries. Even the yellow panels of the 1990s, later abandoned as gauche, marked the jersey's first attempt at a colour distinct from the flag — a faltering step toward treating the shirt as a design object rather than a patriotic default.

Where The Shirts Go To Rest: Blades Of Glory

If the jersey is a text, which it is, Pune is where its archive lives. The Blades of Glory Cricket Museum, founded by former under-19 cricketer Rohan Pate and inaugurated by Sachin Tendulkar himself in 2012, holds more than 75,000 pieces of memorabilia and describes itself as the largest cricket museum on earth. A dedicated Sachin Tendulkar zone displays the jerseys he wore during India's 2011 World Cup triumph alongside his scorecards and bats, while a separate World Cup zone gathers items connected to every winning side since 1975, and further sections are given over to Virat Kohli and to women's cricket. It is, in effect, the jersey's natural history museum — the one place a garment otherwise seen fleetingly can be examined at leisure, stitch by stitch.