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<\/p>\n\n It\u2019s the kind of celebrity snap you might scroll past on your phone several times a day \u2013 a soccer star and his pop singer girlfriend hand-in-hand on an evening out. There\u2019s a sense of summer ease; both are tanned, dressed in casual black tops and trousers, sandals on.\n <\/p>\n
\n Except the athlete is the world-famous David Beckham, and he\u2019s wearing a patterned sarong around his waist. In 1998 Britain, this was front page news.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cBeckham has got his Posh frock on,\u201d declared The Sun newspaper, alongside a full-page photo of the England player and Victoria \u201cPosh Spice\u201d Adams, as she was known at the time, in France for the World Cup.\n <\/p>\n
\n This wasn\u2019t just any frock, mind you. This was a Jean Paul Gaultier wrap that challenged traditional notions of how a top male soccer player should appear, sending the British tabloids into a hysterical spin.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Almost three decades on, and on the eve of the 2026 World Cup, \u201csarong-gate\u201d as it has come to be known, is also a vivid snapshot of late-1990s British culture in flux. Here was a new kind of \u201cmetrosexual\u201d (remember that?) man and his famous fianc\u00e9e, overlapping with soccer\u2019s hyper-masculine lad culture. The ruthless tabloid press was quick to stir up controversy.\n <\/p>\n
\u2018Wild West\u2019 tabloid landscape<\/p>\n
\n The photo had been taken a year after Princess Diana\u2019s death. \u201cSuddenly we had a new royal family step in, and it was the Beckhams,\u201d said Stephen Doig, men\u2019s style editor at the Telegraph newspaper who has interviewed David several times over the years. In this \u201cWild West\u201d tabloid landscape, there was \u201ca public appetite like we\u2019ve never seen before for the two of them feeding this machine,\u201d added Doig.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cTo see a man like that blurring with gender boundaries as part of this new metrosexual movement was quite shocking and exciting for people,\u201d said Doig. The tabloid coverage of Beckham\u2019s World Cup date night said a lot about British \u201cblokey\u201d culture at the time. A culture that would absolutely raise its brows at a man in a skirt.\n <\/p>\n
\n From junior games on pitches every weekend, to crowds piling into pubs to watch England play the World Cup, football, as it is called outside of the United States, is deeply ingrained in the British national psyche. With it, comes a public sense of ownership of its most important characters.\n <\/p>\n
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\n It seemed everyone \u2013 spanning national newspapers to regional publications \u2013 had thoughts on the sarong, and age was no barrier to a hot take. \u201cI just don\u2019t like men in skirts. I\u2019m used to them wearing trousers,\u201d said an eight-year-old Alex Tong in The York Press.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cFor a long time, young boys looked up to these superstars as who they want to be when they grow up; they\u2019re these icons of masculinity, of what it looks like to be a man,\u201d said Lauren Cochrane, senior fashion writer at the Guardian newspaper. \u201cAnything that messes with those gender roles within a football context is huge. It\u2019s seismic. But it also shows how false those things are, they\u2019re constructs, essentially.\u201d\n <\/p>\n Brand Beckham<\/p>\n \n The 23-year-old Beckham seemed to take the media frenzy in good humor. \u201cYou haven\u2019t seen nothing yet,\u201d he said with an awkward chuckle when reporters asked him about it at the time, in a resurfaced clip for his recent Netflix documentary. At least his father, Ted, was positive: \u201cI like that,\u201d he recalled telling his son in the show. \u201cYou look smart in that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Over the years, Beckham doubled down on having no regrets over the sarong, insisting past fashion choices were entirely his own. If anything, the incident has become part of brand Beckham mythology; an early indication of David and Victoria\u2019s fashion-forwardness and media savvy that has morphed into today\u2019s multimillion-dollar sport, beauty and business empire.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cHe\u2019s very knowing,\u201d said Doig, who added that Beckham always had \u201ca bit of a laugh about it\u201d when they discussed the sarong. Brand Beckham would not be the success it is today, \u201cif it were not for the two of them making very daring fashion choices in the \u201890s that put them front and center of every newspaper in the world,\u201d Doig added.\n <\/p>\n \n What did hurt Beckham was the assessment from England manager Glenn Hoddle that the player had taken his eye off the ball. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s been focused coming into this tournament,\u201d said Hoddle, also in archive footage in the Netflix documentary.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt killed me,\u201d Beckham said of Hoddle\u2019s comments which set off a flurry of speculation around his professionalism. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair was being asked whether Beckham should be on the squad \u2013 a question he wisely refused to be drawn into.\n <\/p>\n \n These days, it\u2019s hardly unusual to see a top soccer player in daring designer clothing. Ex-Arsenal player H\u00e9ctor Beller\u00edn wore bright pink on the Louis Vuitton catwalk in 2019<\/a>, while Real Madrid\u2019s Eduardo Camavinga walked for Balenciaga in 2022.<\/a> Going into this World Cup, the stylish French national team have already been heralded as winning the fashion stakes.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n And when it comes to men in sarongs \u2013 or skirts, kilts, even dresses \u2013 everyone from Brad Pitt to A$AP Rocky<\/a> and Harry Styles<\/a> have been seen embracing these flowing garments.\n <\/p>\n \n We\u2019ve come a long way since 1998 \u2013 but not all the way, said Cochrane, who pointed to the social media abuse English player Dominic Calvert-Lewin received after wearing flamboyant or skirt-like outfits in various magazine photoshoots in recent years.\n <\/p>\n \n The way Beckham \u201cexperimented with fashion, even when he was mocked for it, is to be admired,\u201d said Cochrane, adding that it might have even helped the next generation of men challenge conventions through clothing.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the kind of celebrity snap you might scroll past on your phone several times a day \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-625789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"England](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/gettyimages-2211834821.jpg\")
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