Kappa

Kappa was born from a well handled mistake. The parent company, Maglificio Calzificio Torinese, had been making socks and underwear in Turin since 1916, and in the 1960s, after a defective batch, created a quality control stamp marked with the letter K, a guarantee of checked product. The stamp became a brand, Kappa, and in 1969 gained the most recognisable logo in sport: the omini, the man and woman sitting back to back, born by accident at a swimwear photo shoot. The rest is football and sporting history: Juventus dressed through two golden decades, the United States athletics team at the Los Angeles 1984 Games, the Barcelona of the 1990s, and the Kombat revolution, the skin tight shirts that Cannavaro and Totti's Italy premiered at Euro 2000 and took to the 2002 World Cup. When the parent company failed, the brand was reborn in 1994 in the hands of Turin's BasicNet, pioneer of the licensing model that took it worldwide. From Juve's shoulders to Sassuolo's hoops, the two little sitters never stood up again.