How David Beckham became a style icon for British men

Telegraph

03-05-2025

The soy sauce was his idea. The photoshoot had paused for lunch when David Beckham, wearing a denim jacket with cutoff sleeves and eating Chinese food from the carton, saw the bottle on the table.
'This looks like blood,' he said. 'We should use this.'
He'd already had his hair shaved into a Mohawk – partly for the photoshoot for The Face, the style magazine I was editing (it was the first time a sportsperson had appeared on the cover) – and partly because he was tired of 'so many people with my sort of haircut', he said, referring to the blonde surfer curtains that had become his trademark and had recently appeared on some of the members of Irish boy band Westlife.
It was May 2001. We were in a studio behind Old Trafford. That year, Beckham had recently led Manchester United to victory in both the Premier League and the FA Cup, and captain England. He was 26 years old.
It was only Beckham's sixth photo shoot, and our young German photographer, who would go on to shoot campaigns for Louis Vuitton and Hermès, had envisaged 'footballers as warrior soldiers', having seen Saving Private Ryan on TV the night before.
Beckham – chiselled, manscaped, largely pre-tattoos but with diamond crosses in each ear – cheerfully obliged. Then he emptied the soy sauce bottle over his head, temporarily blinding himself. Cue instant 'blood'.
When this edition of The Face is published, the shot makes the entire front cover of The Sun. We are also in Heat, the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, and on The Big Breakfast, GMTV and Radio 5 Live. I was interviewed about it and the magazine went 'viral', pre-social media.
What happened here? Did Beckham intuit the opportunity to create an attention-grabbing image? Was he just mucking about or was it something more shrewd?
I first encountered him the previous year, when he turned up to a gala fashion party with new wife, Spice Girl Victoria Adams, in matching head-to-toe leather. It is considered polite to go 'full look' when invited to a designer's event – except this was a Versace party, and Posh and Becks wore Gucci. 'It still haunts me,' Victoria said in an interview in 2022.
This weekend sees Goldenballs mark his 50th birthday. Twenty-four years on from that magazine encounter, he still has the power to stop traffic, and now generate traffic, with an arresting image. See his recent shoot for Boss in tighty-whities, something that prompted lust and lamentation in equal parts: the latter, that any midlife male could have such a conspicuous absence of anything remotely approaching 'dad bod'. Why does the way David Beckham looks continue to fascinate us? How has he stayed in our gaze for so long?
In the beginning, it was a heady combination of talent, fame and hotness. The preternaturally gifted lad from Leytonstone, a poet with his right foot, the England captain who looked like a Botticelli statue with his kit off. The beautiful man who played the beautiful game.
He always wanted to be famous, and he said so. He loved the razzmatazz of fashion, and he said so. He was the first footballer who understood that 'season' could mean something else.
'Footballers have always had that label of drinking and being macho, and I think it's definitely changing,' Becks said in Salford that day back on the photo shoot. 'I think you've always got to have something outside of your job. Shoots like this I enjoy, it's an honour. Even though I'm all soy sauce.'
'Is it because change is in the air?' our writer Sylvia Patterson wondered. 'It's a big, gay modern world out there, and you want to represent it?' 'It's just the way I am,' Becks replied. 'It's the way I was brought up. I'm not being false. Deep down, I don't give a monkey's.'
He gave a recent example. 'Before the Finland game, we were staying in a hotel and I got a phone call from the press person in London saying, 'Have you just had a manicure?' And I said, 'Well, yeah,' and she said, 'Well, one of the papers has got hold of it.'' (The writer Mark Simpson, who coined the word 'metrosexual', cited Beckham as 'the biggest example' of the trend in Britain. 'Because he loved being looked at, and because so many men and women love to look at him.')
He'd loved clothes since forever. Aged seven, he'd gone shopping with his hairdressing mum Sandra for a pageboy outfit for a family wedding. He insisted on white socks up to his knees, velvet maroon knickerbockers, white ballet shoes, a frilly Spanish shirt and a matching maroon waistcoat. Mum told him he'd be laughed at, but he didn't care. He started wearing it around the house.
And he continued not giving a monkey's. By his shoot for The Face, we'd already had The Sarong Incident, when he was photographed at the 1998 World Cup in France wearing the Gaultier number out to dinner, prompting howls of ridicule from the UK press, and the joke was that it was clearly Victoria who wore the trousers. 'The most tragic fashion crime in history,' declared, er, Piers Morgan. (It was Beckham's own. Of course it was. He'd bought it while shopping with Mel B's ex-husband Jimmy Gulzar, in Paris.)
Then came the head-to-toe white outfits, the beanie hats, the man bun, the double denim, the mesh tops, the leather wrist wraps and the sharply tailored suits. Beckham swung between streetwear and Savile Row before such a high-low mix was considered plausible. He endorsed luxury labels like Armani while maintaining his working-class roots, creating a template for future generations – Cristiano Ronaldo, Jack Grealish – to lean heavily into fashion. Before Beckham, few people cared what shirt footballers wore off the pitch.
'He was truly one of the first athletes in Europe to successfully broker big-money brand deals,' says the fashion and sports journalist Daniel-Yaw Miller of the SportsVerse newsletter. 'For him to break into the fashion industry was equally impressive at a time when fashion had a distinct mistrust of football, which it saw as lowbrow and harmful to its elitist image.' It helped that he could shift product like few other men – a gift that continues to this day.
'It goes mad,' says Terry Donovan, marketing director at the frequently Beckham-endorsed menswear brand Percival. 'He throws on a linen suit or a knitted polo and traffic spikes, socials blow up, and before you know it – sold out. Doesn't matter what it is. If Becks wears it, the lads want it.' Of course, not everything worked – the now terribly un-PC 2003 cornrows inspired by a trip to South Africa jump to mind – but, crucially, he never backed down.
Lately, he has evolved from a rugged heritage phase (baker boy caps, tweeds, Barbour jackets) into something that may be described as Modern British Male: military coats, soft tees, smart-casual wear.
'He's quite happy to show himself on his Instagram with his chickens in his garden,' says the fashion editor and consultant Catherine Hayward. 'And he's got terrible beige dad socks on with an orange beanie. Then he'll wear a really nice navy coat when he goes out in the evening with his family. Or he's on stage, and he's wearing a double-breasted light brown peak lapel suit. He's just very confident in what he does. And that comes with age. It's not edgy fashion, like Harry Styles. He's done that, and he was the first one to do it.'
Indeed, he recently said he'd leave 'being daring' to his kids. 'My aesthetic is really kind of classic now,' he said last month. 'It's very understated.' It's tempting to imagine the Mohawk and the soy sauce might be taken up by Brooklyn or Romeo. Except that you know that they won't.
There's only one David Beckham.