Polly Vernon
I MISS WAGS! The World Cup starts, and ALL I can think is: where are they?
Those epic peacock women, with their hair, bodies and teeny-tiny, cut-off denim shorts, which they insisted on wearing with long-line, skinny vest tops and high heels, because why not? And their nails and tans (applied by fake-tan artistes, flown in at great expense), and their complex hierarchical structures, played out on the terraces and during girls’ nights out, through the course of which they would strut in formation across cobbled streets. The queen bees and the newbies, the thinnest versus the prettiest versus the most commercially viable versus the childhood sweetheart of the footballer no one had even heard of, until he performed brilliantly, and she was suddenly imbued with the highest status of them all! The ones who worked – generally pop stars – slagging off the ones who didn’t (the SAHWS, Stay At Home WAGS); the feuds, the furore, the boobs! The new-gen Posh, and Alex Curran and Coleen notyet-but-almost Rooney and Melanie Slade, just doing her A-levels… Where are they? Why don’t I know them? Why can’t I see them? Who killed WAGS? And why?
It couldn’t just have been that one decision, taken post-baden-baden (2006, aka The World Cup The WAGS Won), by a long-forgotten England manager (Fabio Somesuch) to ban WAGS from all future contests, that did for all WAGS, always – could it? Or Victoria Beckham, original WAG overlord, abandoning the art form for something more ‘credible’? Was it the general discrediting of presumed WAG values – conspicuous consumption, overt sexuality, and attaching your identity and self-worth wholesale to that of a high-profile man – that rendered WAGS obsolete? And worse: unfashionable? It’s hard to imagine WAGS coexisting with The Current Moment. Hard to imagine that the dual forces of Twitter’s bitchiness and its political activism wouldn’t conspire to troll them, then judge them, into oblivion. Because, haven’t you heard? WAG X is a total whore; and also? We think her last hair style was a little cultural appropriation-y…
But World Cups were so much better when the WAGS were there! Have you seen football? It’s like: a field, with men on it. A storyline, with only three possible endings (win, lose or draw). Hours and hours of a ball going this-a-way, then that-a-way, and the very best anyone can hope for is that someone falls over. A World Cup without the glorious, layered, actual reality show of the WAGS, without their pride, pregnancies, nipple-length ’dos, expressions/hangovers obscured behind mega-shades… Without them, what even is it? What is its point?