LAURIE CUNNINGHAM

Scan through Google image results of the late, great Laurie Cunningham and it’s hard to believe they aren’t the product of high-end fashion shoots, professionally styled and groomed, the work of a huge team and editorial machine. Surely nobody could look that good off their own back.

In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re pictures from a A/W19 streetwear campaign – taken with a vintage camera, styled with a retro feel and aged on Photoshop, but very much of today. Except, of course, they aren’t. Cunningham really did look that good.

His favourite pieces were zoot suits, shearling jackets, velour raglan sweaters and tapered trackies, accessorised with a thin gold chain, slightly grown-out hair and sandals. This was not the same clobber his contemporaries were wearing. His style was innate and otherworldly, and could only have come from someone who really thought about what they were wearing.

Cunningham is the football style icon. He didn’t just look good by the (admittedly low) standards of the game; he looked good by anyone’s standards – even the standards of pop stars and models. In a just world, he would be up there with Bowie, Ferry, Goldie – anyone who is considered to be an aesthete’s aesthete. But, perhaps because of what a footballer he was, and because of the problems he had in pushing against racism, it’s only now that we can step back and understand how, in an aesthetic sense, he was far ahead of his time.

Cunningham was a style icon before he was even a professional footballer. He was a real Ace Face, not just a sheltered athlete who made a bit of money and started buying everything in Brown’s. In the late-70s London soul scene, he was a disco Adonis; a competition-winning dancer who had to make the very rare choice between the Rambert School of Ballet and Leyton Orient Football Club. “When I used to go dancing in Soho back in the ’70s,” professional stylista Robert Elms wrote recently, “I used to look up to these really cool young black guys, and Laurie Cunningham was one of them.”

As a teenager, Cunningham was something of a budget fashion magpie, trawling London’s markets and second-hand shops and buying up vintage suits and accessories – some of which he had recreated by East End tailors to his own specifications. He wore such a piece in a now-famous photo celebrating the signing of his first professional contract in 1974 (left).

Of all Cunningham’s looks, this hasn’t dated the best, but it gives us perhaps the clearest vision of who he was as a player and a style obsessive. In an era when most footballers wore cheap suede jackets and flares, here was Cunningham looking like something out of a rudeboy Cotton Club, ruining his shoes on a waterlogged pitch in Leytonstone, all in the pursuit of looking magnificent. Against the grimness of his era, Laurie had an almost alien level of class. That the winger later became the first Englishman to play for Real Madrid seems of little wonder in retrospect.

However, his strongest looks, which resonate best with the current aesthetic climate, are his later ones – almost hip hop-influenced, when he had bulked up, grown a moustache and started rocking early athleisure wear. Those are the looks that really stand up; that show a man truly comfortable, yet thoughtful about the clothes he wears; that, for years to come, will be referenced but never quite recreated. Had he been born slightly later, had he not died in that car crash in Spain, it’s easy to imagine that Laurie Cunningham might still be on the cover of magazines.

CUNNINGHAM HAD TO MAKE A RARE CHOICE: THE RAMBERT SCHOOL OF BALLET OR LEYTON ORIENT FOOTBALL CLUB