Uni Watch is a media project that deconstructs the finer points of sports uniforms, logos, related topics in obsessive and excruciating detail. It’s not about fashion — it’s about documenting and assessing the visual history of sports (or as we like to call it, athletics aesthetics), and about minutiae fetishism as its own reward.
Uni Watch debuted in May of 1999, as a column in the sports pages of The Village Voice. It was a very small column in those days, and it was designed primarily for print, not for the web, so there weren’t any photo links. When the Voice sports section was eliminated in 2003, the column briefly moved to Slate.com. Then, in the summer of 2004, the column moved to ESPN.com, where it continued to run for the next 15 years. The column has also had brief runs at Sports Illustrated, InsideHook, Bulletin, and Substack.
This blog, originally designed to supplement the column, launched on May 17, 2006, and is now Uni Watch’s sole platform. It was originally run by Paul Lukas, who still owns the site; daily content is now overseen by Phil Hecken.
The blog’s staff and credits are as follows:
Founder/Publisher: Paul Lukas
Editor: Phil Hecken
Weekend Editor: Jim Vilk
Ticker Assistants: Anthony Emerson, Jamie Rathjen
Web designer/developer: John Ekdahl
Uni Watch logo designer: Bryan Molloy