It’s difficult to recall, but before there was Messi, or Erling Haaland, lighting up the soccer pitch, there was David Beckham. Time was, the world — meaning both the larger worlds of international soccer and the pin-sized world of celebrity fashion — could count on footie-maestro and former Emporio Armani underwear model David Beckham to come up with some arresting, or at least energetic, fashion choices. It was theatre scripted and directed by some prodigious, inner-Beckham ‘fashion id.’
On this or that red carpet, we could watch him realize and costume himself down to the nines as a blond James-Dean-ish leather-clad biker with his then-budding-fashionista Spice Girl, Victoria, pictured below in 1999 at a (what else) Versace store opening party in London, or in his post-Manchester United adoption of a rather snappy Britain-in-the-Thirties topper of a raffish, capacious newsboy flat-cap. In every case, especially tweedy or “proper” in the sense of Jermyn Street tailoring, Mr. Beckham was decidedly not. It wasn’t the point. Bottom line: During his playing career, Beckham’s looks were chock full of appetite and mischief — at work was more than a bit of Dickens’ Artful Dodger, very little Oliver Twist. That was the intent, and part of the charm.
Notably, over time during the Aughts, as he was in the teeth of his many on-field successes, Beckham transitioned from a mere disco-boy-on-a-night-out into a more seriously regarded athletic icon. His many trophy-winning years with Manchester United Beckham’s many athletic sponsors and, increasingly, firms quite unrelated to footballl — such as the creatives behind Emporio Armani’s ultra-sultry come-hither underwear campaigns — figured out that top footballers were enormously fit and looked rather good when you got them in front of a camera naked, or mostly so.
An added benefit was that there was no learning curve as ‘models’ for sportswomen or sportsmen, who were fairly well-schooled at being naked in rooms full of people, spending as much of their lives as they had in gyms and locker rooms. In his particular case, Beckham had further budding-male-model arrow in his quiver: He had patented a polished, faux-ominous “Blue Steel” male-model look, a somewhat distant, not-quite-vacuous-yet-oddly-blank stare that seemed to portend he was thinking about something serious, when in fact not much was going on.
In Emporio Armani’s case, what they wanted Beckham to look like he was thinking about was sex, but it wasn’t so much “thinking” as it was about figuring out how to display the well-trained abdominals. By 2009, giant blow-ups of Beckham disporting himself in Emporio Armani unmentionables were everywhere on earth — Times Square, Picadilly Circus, Place Vendome, you name it — as pictured above on the London flagship of Selfridges department store when a new Armani line was rolled out. Bingo: By 2012 Beckham had his own underwear line with giant H&M, and was off manufacturing the trainloads of coin that would, eventually, form his “retirement” investment in Inter Miami.
By 2014, no less a fashionista than Tommy Hilfiger was described Beckham in the already-breathless — if highly dubious — industrial-strength hyperbole as: “The underwear model of the century.” And yet, we should forgive Mr. Hilfiger for that. In 2014, just a decade and a bit into this century (of dubious male underwear), Cristiano Ronaldo had not yet debuted his CR7 line (2017), and baller-of-the-minute Erling Haaland was but an unsponsored junior player up on that uncharted sub-Arctic peninsula where there are the Northern Lights, underwear far from his mind.
The last years of Manchester United led to a stripped-down skinhead sort of Beckham image, pictured in 2001 at the kickoff of the Adidas “I Kiss Football” campaign. Gone were the faux-blond locks. The white crewneck above, with its ransom-note cut-out letters, was an early-Aughts riff on the Sex Pistol’s own art-direction-shattering album covers as designed by Jamie Reid. It was as if Beckham were preparing for the empire that was to come. Mr. Beckham had stripped down for the millennium.
Fast forward 22 years from that shot to best seats in the house at Inter Miami’s DRV PNK stadium in Fort Lauderdale, where, in the teeth of a fine playoff season, Mr. Beckham, the team president and a co-investor, is likely to be found. Let’s first note: He’s 48, at the cusp. As he moves into his sixth decade among us in the next 24 months, he has attained one of the great sports-business pinnacles in obtaining the one player for his organization pictured on the pitch before him, Lionel Messi, top, who has revived the team and with it, brought such great energy to the sport in the United States.
In a word, Beckham is now dressing the part of the subdued, yet powerful, dealmaker — within the somewhat showier tropical confines of Miami. The debatable flash of this or that bit of neck ink peeks out still above his regulation white-or-blue dress shirt collars, and very much at odds with the Ivy-League-blue team blazer, but, what the hell. He has gotten to the regulation suits and blazers honestly — bit of a long and winding road, but he looks natural in them. The tattoos are a reminder of him as a player, and he doesn’t really need to do underwear ads any more. Suffice it to say, there aren’t a lot of owners in Major League Soccer who look like him, and the ones that do aren’t as fit as Beckham, so in this way, the man writes his own hall pass.
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