Héctor Bellerín joins football's team of new fashion influencers
From George Best to David Beckham through to more recent stars such as Megan Rapinoe and Héctor Bellerín, footballers and fashion go together like Posh and Becks.
But while old-school footballers influenced fashion purely based on what they wore, today’s contemporary crop reflect ideals of altruism and outspokenness in a way those who came before them did not.
Bellerín, who releases a sustainably made collection with H&M on Thursday, is the latest footballer to team up with a fashion brand, but in a more socially responsible way.
His collection of parkas, shirts and blazers, which are made from organic cottons, Tencel and recycled polyester, is a rare example of a collaboration between a high-street brand and celebrity that sets its stall out as a more conscious offering within mainstream fast fashion.
While conceding that “no brand is 100% sustainable”, Bellerín, who is vegan, stresses the importance of making his collection as close to it as possible. In a Q&A to promote the collection, he says: “To me there can be no other way.” He added: “Activism through clothes is also a way of protesting and walking in the right direction.”
His collaboration follows similar ones including by Marcus Rashford, who joined forces with Burberry in November on a series of initiatives to help disadvantaged young people, and the US women’s team co-captain and LGBTQ rights spokesperson Rapinoe, who took up the role of autumn/winter 2020 face of Loewe and told CNN at the time that she welcomed it as an opportunity to challenge the roles given to athletes in women’s sport, “where I feel we’re very boxed in”. The Lyon footballer Memphis Depay also partnered with the Italian luxury brand Valentino in collaboration with Gaffer magazine. In an interview to tie in with the campaign, he spoke on issues such as the detrimental impacts of social media.
The influencing role of footballers has evolved during the pandemic, and their fashion clout has grown in tandem. “This last year has allowed people more time for reflection and … brands [have looked at ways] that they can do things differently,” including tapping into new talent, says Jordan Wise, the co-founder of Gaffer and False 9, a content agency that often works with footballers.
From a footballer’s perspective, Wise says, “They’ve also had a lot more free time at home and outside of the bubble of going to the training ground and playing matches.” It was the extra time that made Bellerín’s H&M collaboration possible. “He had time to sit on Zoom calls with their design team in Sweden,” says Ehsen Shah, the chief executive and founder of BEngaged,
the sports marketing agency that represents Bellerín. “He lives by himself, so he had nothing else to do.”
Football, he thinks, was a barrier to footballers finding their voice outside the sport – he recalls “a lot of bashing” from the fashion industry when Bellerín began turning up at catwalk shows in statement pieces that Shah says he dressed in strategically to stand out. Even now, he says, “there’s still such a long way to go for fashion to ever take football seriously”.
But there are reasons this generation is finding more influence. They are, says Wise, “far more expressive than previous [ones], so the modernday athlete or musician have interests outside of the remit they’re known for”, and increasingly, footballers “are expressing themselves from a fashion perspective”.
Belonging to Generation Z themselves, footballers such as Rashford and Bellerín speak to their large audiences in ways players of the past could only dream of. Wise gives Depay as a good example: “He really does have a personality larger than the sport. He’s just dropped his first music album, so he’s got a really strong following for his exploits as an artist.”
Footballers’ followings can rival that of Hollywood actors and pop stars – Bellerín’s 3 million on Instagram compares favourably with big names such as Morgan Freeman and John Travolta, while Rashford’s 4 millon Twitter following gives him more clout on the platform than Boris Johnson.
While once there was a pervasive stereotype that footballers had little to say and, if they did make it into the papers beyond the sports pages, it was often as they stepped out of fast cars or into nightclubs, many of the new generation are known on a deeper level.
“There’s always been a tetchy relationship between the press and players,” says Shah. “Now it’s direct to fans” – which gives footballers a chance to represent issues they feel strongly about.
Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said.
Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year.
Making peace with nature was the defining task of the coming decades, he said, and the key to a prosperous and sustainable future for all people. The report combines recent major UNassessments with the latest research and the solutions available, representing an authoritative scientific blueprint of how to repair the planet.
The report says societies and economies must be transformed by policies such as replacing GDP as an economic measure with one that reflects the true value of nature, as recommended this month by a study commissioned by the UK Treasury.
Carbon emissions need to be taxed, and trillions of dollars of “perverse” subsidies for fossil fuels and destructive farming must be diverted to green energy and food production, the report says. As well as systemic changes, people in rich nations can act too, it says, by cutting meat consumption and wasting less energy and water.
“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is senseless and suicidal,” said Guterres. “The consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, towering economic losses, and the accelerating erosion of life on Earth.”
The triple emergency threatened our viability as a species, he said. But ending the war would not mean poorer living standards or an end to poverty reduction. “On the contrary, making peace with nature, securing its health and building on the critical and undervalued benefits that it provides are key to a prosperous and sustainable future for all.”
“This report provides the bedrock for hope,” he said. “It makes clear our war on nature has left the planet broken. But it also guides us to a safer place by providing a peace plan and a postwar rebuilding programme.”
Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said:
“We need to look no further than the global pandemic caused by Covid-19, a disease transmitted from animals to humans, to know that the finely tuned system of the natural world has been disrupted.” Unep and the World Health Organization have said the root cause of pandemics is the destruction of the natural world, with worse outbreaks to come unless action is taken.
The report says the fivefold growth of the global economy in the last 50 years was largely fuelled by a huge increase in the extraction of fossil fuels and other resources, and has come at massive cost to the environment. The world population has doubled since 1970 and while average prosperity has also doubled, 1.3 billion people remain in poverty and 700 million are hungry.
It says current measures to tackle the environmental crises are far short of what is needed: the world remains on track for catastrophic warming of 3C above pre-industrial levels, a million species face extinction and 90% of people live with dirty air.
“We use three-quarters of the land and two-thirds of the oceans – we are completely dominating the Earth,” said Ivar Baste of the Norwegian Environment Agency, a lead author of the report.
Prof Sir Robert Watson, who has led UN scientific assessments on climate and biodiversity and is the other lead author of the report, said: “We have got a triple emergency and these three issues are all interrelated and have to be dealt with together. They’re no longer just environmental issues – they are economic issues, development issues, security issues, social, moral and ethical issues.
“Of all the things we have to do, we have to really rethink our economic and financial systems. Fundamentally, GDP doesn’t take nature into account. We need to get rid of these perverse subsidies, they are $5-7tn a year. If you could move some of these towards low-carbon technology and investing in nature, then the money is there.”
This meant taking on companies and countries with vested interests in fossil fuels, he said: “There are a lot of people that really like these perverse subsidies. They love the status quo. So governments have to have the guts to act”.
Financial institutions could play a huge role, Watson said, by ending funding for fossil fuels, the razing of forests and large-scale monoculture agriculture. Companies should act too, he said: “Proactive companies see that if they can be sustainable, they can be first movers and make a profit. But in some cases, regulation will almost certainly be needed for those companies that don’t care.”
Pollution was included in the report because despite improvements in some wealthy nations, toxic air, water, soils and workplaces cause at least 9 million deaths a year, one in six of all deaths. “This is still a huge issue,” said Baste.
The world’s nations will gather at two crucial UN summits in 2021 on the climate and biodiversity crises. “We know we failed miserably on the biodiversity targets [set in 2010],” said Watson. “I’ll be very disappointed if at these summits all they talk about is targets and goals. They’ve got to talk about actions – that’s really what’s crucial.”