Gigi Meroni, Football and Silk in the Same Handwriting

Gigi Meroni belonged to Como before he belonged to anyone else. Long before the mythology of Torino and the songs that followed, there was a local kid shaped by the city’s streets and the simple discipline of play, then a first team debut that introduced a rare kind of winger to Italian football.

He was not built for neat categories. Meroni could beat his man with a dribble that felt improvised yet precise, but his imagination did not switch off after training. As a teenager he worked as a textile designer, and the visual instincts that guided him on the pitch also appeared on paper, in colour, line, and pattern.

That dual identity sits at the heart of a temporary exhibition at the Silk Museum of Como, supported by Como 1907 as part of a wider network of local institutions and patrons. Rather than treating Meroni as a nostalgia object, the exhibition builds a fuller portrait, pairing sporting memory with creative output and the culture that grew around him.

The museum route moves in two threads. One follows the footballer: early steps in Como, then his rise through Genoa and into Torino, told through shirts, photographs, original memorabilia, and period reporting. The other follows the artist and creative: textile studies produced in Como’s silk studios in 1958 and 1959, alongside paintings from his years in Turin. The point is not to claim that Meroni lived two separate lives, but to show how one sensibility ran through both.

For Como, that matters. The Silk Museum is not just a gallery space, it is a keeper of the city’s working history, and Meroni’s designs belong to the same tradition as the looms and ateliers that made Como famous. The exhibition even reproduces a selection of his textile designs as silk scarves, reconnecting his ideas to the material that first trained his eye.

Como 1907 also chose to honour Meroni in the club’s Legends Collection, created with adidas and dedicated to Meroni and other players. The collection includes adidas footwear and apparel that translates biography into design, giving supporters a way to carry these stories into everyday life.

Supporting the exhibition and celebrating Meroni through the Legends Collection is the same gesture in two forms: respect for a player who began here, and for a city where football, craft, and style have always shared the same shoreline.