The Washington Commanders unveiled their 2026 regular and alternate jerseys and new helmets on Wednesday, and the redesign leans hard into the team’s past while stopping short of changing its present. The club will wear white former throwback jerseys as one of its primary uniforms in 2026, pair them with a new burgundy set, and introduce a gloss burgundy helmet with a white-gold-white stripe pattern and a gold facemask that can be used with either primary uniform.
Josh Harris bought the team from Daniel Snyder for $6.05 billion in 2023, and the new look is another sign that the franchise under his ownership wants to reshape how it presents itself without reopening the debate over its name. Harris has said multiple times publicly that the team is not changing the name back, even as some fans continue to push for a return to the club’s former identity.
The details matter because the uniforms are not just a wardrobe change. The Commanders are using block letter player names on the back of the jerseys, and they are redoing their black alternate jerseys as well. The black alternate helmet will have a spear interwoven through the W, a nod to the single-spear helmet worn in the late 1960s. The new burgundy helmet, meanwhile, connects directly to another part of the franchise’s history with its white-gold-white stripe pattern and gold facemask.
That history is doing a lot of the work here. In 1969, the franchise wore a single-spear helmet and dark burgundy jerseys in the Vince Lombardi season. In the 1980s and 1990s, it wore white throwback jerseys while winning three Super Bowl titles, including the 1991 championship season. The new uniforms borrow from both eras, giving the team a visual bridge between the old Redskins identity that Harris has refused to restore and the Commanders name it is trying to make stick.
Adam Peters added a small but revealing detail on Thursday at his pre-draft presser, saying he had just gotten the new helmet in his office and that it “looks a lot better.” That kind of offhand praise matters because the redesign is being sold not as a break from the past but as a cleaner, more deliberate version of it. For Harris, who spent billions to take control in 2023, the answer to the larger question is already clear: the Commanders are changing their look, not their name.
