Footballers, modelling and the power of expression

If John Halls was playing the game Two Truths and a Lie, the 42-year-old north Londoner would be difficult to decipher.

In 1991, as a young child, he appeared in the opening scene of a Kylie Minogue music video. The video for Word Is Out was filmed in Camden Market in the early hours of the morning and included a cameo from British TV presenter Davina McCall as one of Minogue’s backup dancers.

A decade on, aged 19, Halls made his debut for boyhood club Arsenal against Manchester United at Highbury in the Worthington Cup (now the Carabao Cup) third round.

The midfielder from Islington, who also played at full-back, was subbed on in the second half of the 4-0 win to replace a player who went on to win the Champions League with Barcelona in 2006 and started in a World Cup final in 2010. Shortly after swapping places with former Netherlands left-back Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Halls was shown a yellow card for blocking Phil Neville’s cross with his arm. Twenty minutes later, he kicked through winger Bojan Djordjic and was booked again, and then sent off.

Eleven years later, his career ended in similarly abrupt circumstances.

After leaving Arsenal in 2003 and going on to feature for the likes of Stoke City, Brentford and Crystal Palace, Halls was forced to retire at 30 because of an ongoing injury.

This premature end didn’t really hit home for Halls until he was in his mid-thirties and experienced a period of depression. The onset of low mood thanks to his dealing with losing his football career was delayed after what happened on a trip to a London shopping centre days after his contract at Wycombe Wanderers expired.

“I literally retired, got my last pay cheque, and then for about five days, I was crying,” says Halls. “I was in the shopping centre and my now agent approached me and said: ‘Do you want to be a model?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, come on, let’s do it,’ and that was it. The next day, I went straight in for a test shoot and they signed me the day after that.”

A six-week stint in New York a few months later fast-tracked Halls into the world of high fashion. It was during that time in 2013 when he shot the cover for Man of the World, a men’s fashion magazine.

“Once that came out, it propelled me and that was it — I didn’t stop working,” he said. “It was crazy. For two or three years, it was madness. I was travelling everywhere, working everywhere. It really helped with me ignoring that I’d lost my football career. The depression of losing your career, which came on later, was dampened a bit.”

Since then, Halls has been a regular on the catwalk for Giorgio Armani. He has opened shows for Dolce & Gabbana, worked with Brunello Cucinelli and watched his work for H&M illuminated on billboards in Times Square.

Halls feels “super lucky” and with good reason. Switching careers from football to fashion as he did more than a decade ago was not a path well trodden. David Beckham was among the anomalous outliers who operated in both spaces with ease. Nowadays, there are a number of footballers who combine a career in football with fashion and modelling.

In September, Barcelona and France full-back Jules Kounde had his torso covered in whipped cream during a campaign shoot with French fashion house Jacquemus. In the same month, Arsenal and England midfielder Declan Rice made his runway debut for menswear brand Labrum during their London Fashion Week show at the Emirates Stadium.

Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice walks for Labrum at London Fashion Week in September (Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

Former Arsenal defender Hector Bellerin is widely recognised as someone who helped usher in this new era. In 2019, he could not be missed in bright pink as he walked the Paris street runway for Louis Vuitton’s SS20 collection.

Everton striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin is another trailblazer. When he wore a handbag and flared shorts for the cover of fashion magazine Arena Homme + in 2021, it was a watershed moment. Renowned British stylist Harry Lambert, who has worked with singer Harry Styles and actor Emma Corrin, was behind the non-conforming look which brought Calvert-Lewin plenty of praise.

But with that praise came predictable criticism. Calvert-Lewin’s outfit naturally caught the attention of plenty of trolls and with that came a swathe of criticism, some of it homophobic, thanks in no small part to the Everton frontman’s shorts being widely mistaken for a skirt. Bellerin, Rice and Kounde have all experienced similar reactions to their own modelling work.

Some fans argue players should “stick to football”. Some are unwilling to understand or accept the importance of self-expression, off-the-pitch creativity or gender norms being challenged. But there is an entire community who do get it.

Jordan Clarke is the founder of Footballer Fits, a platform he put together while working in the stockroom at British retailer Argos. Footballer Fits celebrates footballers’ fashion with an audience who relish in it. Marcus Thuram (Inter Milan), Amadou Onana (Aston Villa), Alex Iwobi (Fulham) and Tim Weah (Juventus) are some of the footballers who have been styled, photographed and interviewed by Clarke and his team.

“It’s great players are now feeling they can go and do these things (like Rice and Kounde) because a little while ago, they were probably too scared with the pressure on football and the mindsets of pundits, fans or clubs,” Clarke says.

Hector Bellerin models for Louis Vuitton at Paris Men’s Fashion Week in 2019 (Estrop/Getty Images)

“There is less fear of what people think now. The stigma of being manly and ‘football is a man’s game’ and other outdated mindsets are being eradicated. That’s why we’re seeing men’s players paint their nails, wear a skirt or do things you might not have seen years ago because of the way the dressing rooms were. Now, society is a lot more open to it and it is so positive to see.”

Morgan Allan is a creative director for Versus, which describes itself as a “platform championing the future of football and its rising influence on new music and culture”. He is fresh from directing Versus’ recent shoot with Bayern Munich’s Jamal Musiala, where the German international was styled in Italian label Bottega Veneta.

“Social media has given footballers agency over their own profile, which means they’re less at the whim of brands but also the whim of their football clubs,” says Allan.

“When you talk to these footballers, like Rafael Leao (AC Milan), Trevoh Chalobah (Crystal Palace) or Jamal Musiala, they say: ‘We train for a few hours a day, we drive to training, come back and then we just have the rest of our lives.’

“They play once or twice a week, and then have so much other time. There’s only so much (EA Sports FC) Ultimate Team you can play before your mind starts to wander. For Chalobah, he said fashion helps enhance his football because it takes his mind off it. It allows him to stop thinking about it, which is very difficult for elite sportspeople to do.”

Clarke says photographers have sent images to Footballer Fits to post a player’s outfit because the player is unable to publish them themselves after losing a game or not playing well. He has had shoots delayed and cancelled for the same reason.

“It’s sad,” he says. “Football is a short career and no matter how well paid they are during that career, there’s no point looking back at it thinking about all the opportunities you turned down because of what someone might say.

“You can sit in your house doing nothing and they’re (detractors) still going to say something, whether it be a performance or the fact you walked past a fan and didn’t high-five them. Paul Pogba was talking about it recently. He said if something goes wrong in your career, the phone calls and opportunities stop, so take it while you’re at the top of the game.”

“Footballers are people. They’re not machines built to do one thing, no matter how much they cost or how much they get paid,” says Versus’s Allan. “This is an exciting space and there are safe enclaves on the internet like us. But when we do a shoot with Rafa Leao, for example, and he posts himself looking amazing in Bottega, a lot of the comments are: ‘What are you doing? Concentrate on football. That’s what you’re paid to do!’ That narrative still remains.”

When Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford became a brand ambassador for Burberry in 2020, the significance of the moment was not lost on Trisha Lewis, who in 2012 founded Romance FC, a creative football collective based in Hackney, east London.

“Seeing the Burberry campaign with Marcus Rashford was something for myself and us as the Black community to feel really proud of,” Lewis said. “Seeing a Black player being linked to such an iconic British brand, especially with all the flack that had been happening and the constant hate any time any Black player does anything wrong, that was a great win.”

Football and fashion coming together is not just two cultures merging. It can, like Rashford’s work with Burberry, mean more. When former Lionesses manager Hope Powell was photographed alongside a number of women for British designer Martine Rose’s second Nike collaboration released in 2022, it brought their stories to the fore.

“Martine Rose stretched it to a whole new audience,” Lewis explains. “Those interested in subculture and those from creative industries learned about these footballers’ stories. They might not have known Hope Powell was England’s first Black manager had they not seen that campaign.

“And now I’m seeing more players being spotlighted for their greatness as opposed to getting models to play footballers in certain campaigns. We want to see real people, relatable people. And especially in women’s football: we want to see strength being celebrated. You don’t have to be a size six, you don’t have to be 6ft 2in to be a model. What footballers are doing in their space is enough to put them on that platform because they are role models.”

For those who think fashion and football should not mix, it is too late for that. The two are intrinsically linked and have been long before players became contractually obliged for their image to be used to sell club kits and training gear.

“When you think back to the 1960s (former Northern Ireland and Manchester United winger) George Best was very much tied into the fashion world,” says Lewis.

“He even had his own boutique store in Manchester and nobody frowned upon it. That era was very much fashion-forward and those worlds naturally merged together. When you think about the Calvin Klein campaigns with (former Arsenal player) Freddie Ljungberg, they were literally stopping traffic along the sides of billboards. Whether you knew who he was or not, that made a massive impact.

Former Manchester United player George Best pictured outside his fashion boutique Edwardia in Manchester in 1968 (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“What we’re now seeing in fashion is a lot of designers and brands are taking influence from the football world, so then why wouldn’t it be flipped the other way? Why wouldn’t we be including footballers to represent themselves when in a way that kind of feels a bit exploitative (if not) because football is trending. We shouldn’t be excluding footballers from that space.”

Lewis hopes more women’s footballers from grassroots to the elite level can continue to grow into this space, just as men’s footballers are currently. As for Halls, he encourages any player to get involved in fashion, a career he says saved him. He does have some playful words of warning for his new rivals in the industry, too.

“Footballers are everywhere now. They are taking over my job again, this is the problem,” he jokes. “I don’t mind them doing it, but not too much.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)