JASTAR
ALMATY polo
25 000 ₸
Jastar. A local team. Factory pride.
The kit of a fictional club of the Almaty Shayakhmetov factory. The aesthetic of factory teams of the late Soviet period.
In the «Soviet» part of the collection KÜNAI turns to sport as something the ancestors could truly take part in; football was present in Kazakhstan from 1913, and the Kazakh SSR Football Federation was founded in 1959. «Kairat» (from 1954, as «Lokomotiv Alma-Ata») remained for decades the republic's only representative in the Higher League.
A fictional kit for an Almaty club created by a factory named after Shayakhmetov, by analogy with «Zenit», founded by factory workers.
A blue jersey with a white turn-down collar, a large «ALMATY» inscription, the old Almaty coat of arms, and a fictional factory chevron; laid out as the kit of a late-Soviet factory team. This is a fictional uniform. Any resemblance to existing clubs, names, or symbols is coincidental.
JASTAR
Source
The Soviet era is, for understandable reasons, always contested territory. And at the same time an inseparable part of Kazakhstan’s history. If the collection has one central idea, it is this: history is not about ideology and not about justice. History is what our ancestors lived through, and it is their presence in it that we can always value. So in the «Soviet» part of the collection we turned to what they could certainly take part in, to sport. They did not need to be major politicians or to stand at the epicenter of turning-point events. They could simply be in the moment: move, keep fit, enjoy life, while history ran its course around them.
The choice fell on football, the beautiful game. Football was present in Kazakhstan from 1913 and passed through the eras into Soviet times. Teams arose across the country: they were assembled by trade unions, army structures, factories, and collective farms. The Kazakh SSR’s own Football Federation was founded in 1959.
Soviet time for Kazakhstan holds two truths at once, and both are real. On one side, the famine of 1932–33, the livestock requisition campaign, the latinization and cyrillization of writing, the closure of the mektebs, the loss of whole generations of the intelligentsia. On the other, the first universal literacy, industrialization, a network of roads and cities, the urbanization of the native population, the entry of Kazakhs into the engineering and scientific schools that were new to them. We do not choose one of these truths: we acknowledge both and look in them for what our ancestors actually lived through.
Sport in the USSR was not merely leisure but a built infrastructure. The voluntary sports societies (DSO), «Dinamo» for the security organs, «Spartak» for the trade unions, «Lokomotiv» for the railway workers, «Torpedo» and «Krylya Sovetov» for the factories, formed a parallel map of the country on which each person held their place. The football team of a factory collective is at once about leisure, about belonging, and about a form of citizenship. In the Kazakhstan context it was precisely such teams, factory, miner, railway, that became the first mass school of football.
The year 1959, the founding of the Kazakh SSR Football Federation, is a landmark threshold: from this moment Kazakhstan football enters the all-union system as an independent subject. «Kairat», founded five years earlier, in 1954, as «Lokomotiv Alma-Ata», becomes the flagship and for decades remains the only representative of the Kazakh SSR in the Higher League of Soviet football. Shayakhmetov, in the context of Jastar, is not an incidental figure: Zhumabai Shayakhmetov was the first ethnic Kazakh in the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR (1946–1954) and one of only three Kazakhs to head the republic across the entire Soviet period, alongside Kunaev and Nazarbayev.
Interpretation
Jastar is drawn from local Kazakhstan teams. By analogy with the well-known «Zenit», founded by factory workers, we imagined the kit of an Almaty club created by a fictional factory named after Shayakhmetov, the first ethnic Kazakh in the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR.
Object
Football jersey «JASTAR». The name (Zhastary) refers to one of the alternative options proposed by the voluntary sports society (DSO) before the Almaty team received the official name «Kairat».
A blue shirt with a white turn-down collar and white sleeve cuffs. On the chest a large «ALMATY» inscription is placed in white type. On the left, the old coat of arms of Almaty: a round emblem with an apple. On the right, a rectangular chevron with the logo of the fictional factory named after Shayakhmetov: in Soviet times football teams were formed at factories and other industrial units. At the bottom, a small text patch in the format of an inventory archival tag.
The model is laid out as the kit of a factory or city team: a spare composition, a large state inscription, symbols and chevrons without naming an official club. The design references the sporting history of the late Soviet period through typography, color contrast, and industrial symbols.
