By Sheena McKenzie, CNN
(CNN) — It’s the kind of celebrity snap you might scroll past on your phone several times a day – a soccer star and his pop singer girlfriend hand-in-hand on an evening out. There’s a sense of summer ease; both are tanned, dressed in casual black tops and trousers, sandals on.
Except the athlete is the world-famous David Beckham, and he’s wearing a patterned sarong around his waist. In 1998 Britain, this was front page news.
“Beckham has got his Posh frock on,” declared The Sun newspaper, alongside a full-page photo of the England player and Victoria “Posh Spice” Adams, as she was known at the time, in France for the World Cup.
This wasn’t 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.
Almost three decades on, and on the eve of the 2026 World Cup, “sarong-gate” 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 “metrosexual” (remember that?) man and his famous fiancée, overlapping with soccer’s hyper-masculine lad culture. The ruthless tabloid press was quick to stir up controversy.
‘Wild West’ tabloid landscape
The photo had been taken a year after Princess Diana’s death. “Suddenly we had a new royal family step in, and it was the Beckhams,” said Stephen Doig, men’s style editor at the Telegraph newspaper who has interviewed David several times over the years. In this “Wild West” tabloid landscape, there was “a public appetite like we’ve never seen before for the two of them feeding this machine,” added Doig.
“To see a man like that blurring with gender boundaries as part of this new metrosexual movement was quite shocking and exciting for people,” said Doig. The tabloid coverage of Beckham’s World Cup date night said a lot about British “blokey” culture at the time. A culture that would absolutely raise its brows at a man in a skirt.
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.
It seemed everyone – spanning national newspapers to regional publications – had thoughts on the sarong, and age was no barrier to a hot take. “I just don’t like men in skirts. I’m used to them wearing trousers,” said an eight-year-old Alex Tong in The York Press.
“For a long time, young boys looked up to these superstars as who they want to be when they grow up; they’re these icons of masculinity, of what it looks like to be a man,” said Lauren Cochrane, senior fashion writer at the Guardian newspaper. “Anything that messes with those gender roles within a football context is huge. It’s seismic. But it also shows how false those things are, they’re constructs, essentially.”
Brand Beckham
The 23-year-old Beckham seemed to take the media frenzy in good humor. “You haven’t seen nothing yet,” 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: “I like that,” he recalled telling his son in the show. “You look smart in that.”
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’s fashion-forwardness and media savvy that has morphed into today’s multimillion-dollar sport, beauty and business empire.
“He’s very knowing,” said Doig, who added that Beckham always had “a bit of a laugh about it” when they discussed the sarong. Brand Beckham would not be the success it is today, “if it were not for the two of them making very daring fashion choices in the ‘90s that put them front and center of every newspaper in the world,” Doig added.
What did hurt Beckham was the assessment from England manager Glenn Hoddle that the player had taken his eye off the ball. “I don’t think he’s been focused coming into this tournament,” said Hoddle, also in archive footage in the Netflix documentary.
“It killed me,” Beckham said of Hoddle’s 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 – a question he wisely refused to be drawn into.
Fashion forward
These days, it’s hardly unusual to see a top soccer player in daring designer clothing. Ex-Arsenal player Héctor Bellerín wore bright pink on the Louis Vuitton catwalk in 2019, while Real Madrid’s Eduardo Camavinga walked for Balenciaga in 2022. Going into this World Cup, the stylish French national team have already been heralded as winning the fashion stakes.
And when it comes to men in sarongs – or skirts, kilts, even dresses – everyone from Brad Pitt to A$AP Rocky and Harry Styles have been seen embracing these flowing garments.
We’ve come a long way since 1998 – 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.
The way Beckham “experimented with fashion, even when he was mocked for it, is to be admired,” said Cochrane, adding that it might have even helped the next generation of men challenge conventions through clothing.
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