‘Wags were never dumb blondes’
But today’s England wives and girlfriends are so low-profile that Judith Woods pines for the velour tracksuits of Baden-Baden
What ever happened to the likely Wags? Tanned and svelte, designer-dressed with a sweep of extravagant eyelashes and caramel hair extensions, footballing wives and girlfriends have long brought a sugar rush of glamour to the beautiful game.
But as Harry Kane’s lads line up to face Italy’s finest at Wembley on Monday morning, the focus of the players’ wives and girlfriends will be firmly on the football, rather than the fashion.
For, by any standards, the Wags of ’21 are a very different breed to their forebears. Arm candy they most certainly ain’t.
According to Sam Kimberley, author of the gossipy new book Wag Wars, published this weekend, a lot of onlookers who catch a glimpse of them in the stadium could be in for a bit of a shock at the lack of ostentation.
“Today’s Wags are very different from the traditional cliches of strutting girls with big hair, fake tans and sky-high stilettos,” warns Kimberley. “They’re not trophies — they are a new generation of graduates and businesswomen with careers of their own and a far more understated sense of style.”
Understated is, itself, an understatement. For England’s fixture against Germany last week, Harry Maguire’s fiancee, Fern Hawkins, a physiotherapist, sported an England shirt — a million miles from usual Wag attire.
Ditto Kieran Trippier’s enigmatic wife, Charlotte, so resolutely low-key that she deflected prurient interest in her private Instagram (in itself the antithesis of ritzy, glitzy Wagdom as we know it) with the warning “no strangers looking in”.
Having said that, she at least made the effort to pop a Dior cardie over her team top. Kane’s wife, Kate, a sports science graduate and fitness instructor, toed the England shirt line to the point of austerity, although it was a relief to note Jack Grealish’s girlfriend, Sasha Attwood, a successful model, is obviously a lot more predictable than the mercurial attacking midfielder as she pitched up in — yes — the statutory vest emblazoned with the England logo.
True red-white-and-blue Wags, each and every one — but a far cry from baker-boy caps, peep-toe Louboutins and Coleen Rooney laden with expensive shopping bags like a Bond Street Buckaroo.
Or the Golden Age of Wags, which reached its zenith in 2006, when the girls took over the cobbled streets of sleepy Baden-Baden in military formation, and were so dazzling they not only took the shine off the nation’s footballing luminaries but were blamed for England crashing out of the tournament.
“This past year has been a lean one for the paparazzi and Wags alike,” says Kimberley. “Nightclubs have been shut, there have been no huge weddings or milestone birthdays plastered across the pages of Hello!. They have had so little media exposure, I’m worried they might
soon be extinct.”
How felicitous, then, that he’s managed to get his book in the back of the net before the sun sets on strappy-cami-with-low-slung-jeansand-maybe-a-shrunken-waistcoat combos. And I say this with genuine affection.
Wags captured the popular imagination because, although the labels were high-end, the look was achievable, accessible — easily emulated on a Saturday night in Doncaster or Portsmouth.
Snobby commentators sneered but, as always in Britain, deep down, it was about class; young women from modest backgrounds making a conspicuous effort to look
fabulous was deemed “trying too hard”.
As an overview, Wag Wars is the very definition of an easy read, a cuttings romp reminding us of the Wags who were — Danielle Souness, Ulrika Jonsson, Nancy Dell’Olio — and how they either cannily used or nakedly exploited (depending on your perspective) their platform to further their own media ambitions.
It traces the wives and girlfriends phenomenon right back to its earliest house-coated precursors, when Danny Blanchflower’s wife, Betty, had to stay at home on match days in the
1950s to mind the kids.
Then, by 1966, Tina Moore, wife of England captain Bobby, was doing her bit by taking the other World Cup wives on excursions to — wait for it — The Black and White Minstrel Show and Golders Green shopping centre.
There’s an element of social history in the evolution of the modern Wag there, too, that begs further scrutiny. Back in the 1960s, there were vanishingly few opportunities for working-class girls to gain access to the glitzy, ritzy world of limos and upmarket restaurants. Marrying an up-and-coming footballer was a golden ticket to another world.
“Wags were never dumb blondes; they had to be shrewd and play as good a game off the pitch as their men did on the pitch,” observes Kimberley.
Staying hitched to any player, never mind a Premier League superstar, was not without its trials and tribulations — then and now.
“Footballers have never been easygoing partners,” he points out. “They are usually very young men, rich beyond their wildest dreams, feted wherever they go and inevitably surrounded by women eager to get to know them. Most often in a hotel room.”
Throughout their history, Wags have sought to project a certain image, one that reflected well on their menfolk. With the monetisation of the game in recent times, they competed overtly and covertly off the field to display their luxury and wealth.
But the blingtastic days of Posh and Becks’ golden wedding thrones are a distant memory. Instead, we have Paige Milian, engaged to Raheem Sterling, posting pictures of their impeccably tasteful home. A qualified accountant with her own property company, she favours crushed velvet sofas in palest grey.
Chloe Wealleans-Watts, the singer girlfriend of Mason Mount, favours dove-coloured carpets and gallerywhite walls. High-cost homeliness is “a thing” for the Wags of ’21, who, of an evening, are more likely to be bathing the kids in their luxe Maison Valentina bathtubs (prices only available on request) than falling out of taxis. Is it any wonder when no fewer than eight players are dating or hitched to their childhood sweethearts, or women they met in their teens?
Compared with today’s young Wags, the unseemly spectacle of Rebecca Vardy and Coleen Rooney tying up the High Court with a social media libel case is like watching a pair of dinosaurs engaged in mutually assured destruction. The England squad itself is made up of genuine team players rather than rampant egos in search of personal glory. The same could be said for their other halves.
Today’s Wags are a new generation of graduates and businesswomen with careers of their own and a far more understated sense of style.
Sam Kimberley, author