Two thousand and twenty-six shirts. One for each year of the World Cup they will be worn at. Each one signed inside by the woman who stitched it.

This is the limited edition Mexican national team jersey, a collaboration between adidas and the Mexican social enterprise Someone Somewhere. It launches on 18 May from someonesomewhere.mx and three Mexico City stores. It is the first World Cup shirt for a national team to be embroidered by hand.

The work has been done by Indigenous women in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. The wider adidas Originals collection it sits inside, seven pieces in total, carries 165,000 hours of paid artisan labour. The shirt is rendered in the green, white and red of the flag, with textures the press materials describe as something "no industrial process could replicate". You can believe that without straining. Hand-stitched cotton does not look like screen-printed polyester. It looks like cloth somebody touched.

Each shirt has a QR code sewn into it. Scan, and you find the woman who made it. Where she lives. What her name is. The release calls this "human traceability". The phrase is clunky, the idea is not. A buyer wears a shirt that knows where it came from. The maker has a customer she can imagine.

The timing is sharp. The tournament kicks off on 11 June, less than four weeks after the shirt drops on 18 May. Mexico is co-hosting the 2026 World Cup with the United States and Canada, its third turn as host after 1970 and 1986. Each previous Mexican shirt has an afterlife in fan collections. The new one needed a story of its own. Hand-embroidered in the Sierra Norte, signed by the maker. That is the story.

The origin is itself a small piece of 2020s strangeness. The release explains the project "began as a spark in 2024: an idea, driven by artificial intelligence, that imagined something that seemed impossible". A digital generation suggested a Mexican shirt sewn by hand. Two years on, the human version has caught up with the machine sketch. The artisans took the idea and made it real.

Someone Somewhere is a B Corp. It works with hundreds of rural artisans across seven of Mexico's most marginalised states, signs every product with the maker's name and home town, and reports against ten of the UN's seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. The shirts will retail at the company's stores in Condesa, Antara and Plaza Satélite.

Two thousand and twenty-six of them. After that, the run is gone. The shirt becomes the kind of thing the lucky buyer photographs once and never washes again. The makers, paid fairly, move on to the next collection. The country, meanwhile, walks into a home World Cup wearing something made the way Mexico has always made things. By hand. By women in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. With their names on the shirt the rest of the world is about to see.