Girls and gays around the world are trolling straight blokes by appropriating a sacred item of stereotypical masculinity: the sports jersey.
Touchdown! Score! Dummy-half!
Thanks to It girls like Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Julia Fox who’ve all adopted the jersey trend, bloke-core aesthetic has jumped off TikTok feeds and onto the streets.
Around Paris this Euro summer, fashionistas have been strutting the sidewalk in their finest soccer shirts, football guernseys and baseball tees.
“I think appropriating straight man culture is another step in the gay agenda,” says London tourist Alex Gilbert, 31.
He’s wearing a mesh basketball-style shirt while op-shopping at the Saint-Ouen flea markets in the French capital.
“I think gay stuff has proliferated everything. So I think it’s more chic now to look heterosexual and kind of masculine but in a slightly gay-ish way. It’s a queer play on straight clothes.”
It begs the question: what other stereotypical male accessories can we co-opt? G-shock watches? Threadbare Tradie briefs?
Blokes, take this as a sign to do a thorough stocktake of your wardrobe immediately before whacking a padlock on the door.
Zoya Suinin, 17, says she had to turn to petty crime to keep up with the trend.
“I stole it from my little brother,” she says of the red soccer shirt she started wearing two months ago.
Other people are paying big bucks for sweaty old guernseys.
Eric Cossart who owns Fripe Vintage in the trendy Paris suburb of Le Marais says he had to increase stock after last year’s Euro Cup and now sells at least five jerseys a day to fashionable ladies.
Vintage System assistant manager Mahara Diarte says the shop has been able to hike up the prices since the style took off. A red Italy World Cup jersey on display in the store has a price tag of $140. The yellow and green colour combos of the Brazilian and South African teams are also proving popular.
“Some girls are tailoring them and making them super girly,” she says. “It’s a sexy boyish look.”
Online Aussie retailer The Iconic says sales of soccer jerseys from sports brands like Adidas have spiked 97 percent year-on-year while more “fashion-esque” jerseys have soared 328 percent.
Meanwhile, men’s underwear brand Teamm8 has just released a range inspired by sexy football gear, complete with cropped midriff guernseys.
“The combination of mesh, crop and sports jersey has been a huge hit for us, and although we offered some safer color options, the dusty pink has certainly been a standout,” says the brand’s creative director Michal Nicolas.
Of course, there’s one rule about the trend. Under no circumstances are you to wear the jersey within a sporting context.
Charlie Trapp, 18, is a student at Parsons fashion school and has collected five jerseys over the past few months.
“I’m not sporty, I don’t play sport,” he says. “So me wearing a jersey is funny.”
Co-opting sportsball has never been more fabulous.
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