The Times Magazine - UK (2021-02-20)

(Antfer) #1
16 The Times Magazine

t’s very hard to get a sweeping cultural
stereotype to stick these days, have you
noticed? There was a time when you
could at least rely on footballers to
comply with the best-worst-most-
titillating-most-scurrilous widely held
notions of them: as high-living hedonists
with a mindless, nouveau-riche enabled
compulsion to consume the flashier
things in life – champagne, cocaine,
Gucci, glamour models; men who cared
about little other than scoring goals, winning
games, turning a fast buck...
But then came Marcus Rashford, a top-
flight player who is also casually changing
the world, the legions of Premier League stars
now routinely taking the knee before matches,
Manchester United’s Axel Tuanzebe, who
responded last week to rabid racist online
abuse with dignity and grace in a powerful
Instagram post. Dammit all! How to lampoon
an entire profession for a lazy win, how to
perpetuate a cliché on overpaid undeserving
oafishness and peacockery, if they’re going to
keep on doing good in the world?
Héctor Bellerín is a case in point. He is
the supremely talented Arsenal full back and
Spanish international; a 25-year-old vegan
who drives an electric car and whose elegant
strain of political activism weaves its way
like wisteria through the narrative of his
professional accomplishments and broader
commercial identity. His social media feeds
are filled with images of him training and
winning and starring on glossy magazine
covers – alongside pledges to plant 3,000 trees
every time Arsenal win a game (he’d planted
50,000 trees on that account by August 2020).
Bellerín first came to my attention – I’m a
non-football fan who lives five minutes from
Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, surrounded by
shops and pubs and friends and neighbours
draped in the club’s colours – with a May 2019
tweet about a newly introduced bill that
severely limited access to abortion rights
in the US state of Alabama. His tweet read:
“I wanted to see if anyone from our industry
would speak out about the abortion bill, but
I guess people are too scared. This isn’t just
an issue for women, it’s one for every human
being. We fight for equality and this is
something men should fight for and not hide
away from.” I am a long-term campaigner for
abortion rights. I’d wondered for years why
it was that, given how easily, often and loudly
men speak out against abortion access, that
pro-choice male voices were so incredibly
rare. To have Bellerín rise up like that and
offer such eloquent, compassionate, instinctive
support was just, well, incredibly moving.
He pops up on my Zoom at 6pm one
evening, a shiny, bouncy, chatty, funny
proposition – a sort of politically conscious
puppy of a man (a relief; I’d worried he might

be terribly earnest) – to talk me through a
collection of clothes he’s produced with H&M.
Edition by Héctor Bellerín is a capsule of
some 20 pieces, all made from organic,
recycled and/or repurposed materials and
using transparent chains of production.
This is a second attempt by the brand to
sign up Bellerín. “They wanted me to be a part
of a different kind of collection, just to be a
face of it,” he tells me. He speaks with the
never-not-charming accent and vernacular of
all international football players, a mix of birth
accent and the inflexions and semi-understood
slang of wherever they washed up: Catalonian-
north London, in Bellerín’s case. He peppers
his sentences with phrases like “bit and bob”.
“I said that if I [did] something, I wanted
to design. I wanted to be a part of it. And it’s
something we pushed aside for a bit. But then,
I think almost a year ago, they wanted to go
for it. But, 100 per cent, when you’re talking
to a big high street or fast-fashion company,
it’s difficult for me to be able to achieve what
I want at the end of the collaboration, right?
So I asked so many questions.”
Such as?
“Transparency, the ethics, sustainability...
Also the future, like what is H&M doing?
Because these companies that are so big,
they have these supply chains, and they
have production chains that are so difficult
to change straight away. And I understand that.
I’m for the environment, but I’m also realistic.
And I know that so many things take time to
change. But for me, what’s most important is:
are we trying to change this? Or are we just
settling with what we have? But I was really
happy with what H&M showed me.”
It isn’t hard to see what H&M sees in
Bellerín. He is just the right mix for now. He
has the desirable, intensely aspirational, wide,
wide reach of the rapidly ascending football
superstar, with the added authenticity of a
strong moral stance. On top of which, he has
serious fashion chops. Bellerín really loves
clothes. Back in the time when decadent indoor
gatherings like fashion shows were allowed,
Bellerín was a front-row regular alongside
girlfriend Shree Patel (a model – Bellerín has
not quite eschewed all footballer tropes). And
in 2019, he walked the Louis Vuitton runway
at Paris Fashion Week in brightest pink.
His everyday off-pitch outfit choices


  • experimental, dramatic, even perhaps avant
    garde compared with your classic footballer
    aesthetic – have become an extension of
    his public identity, sometimes questioned
    or maligned by the football press, although
    always embraced, celebrated and admired
    by the fashion press. Over the past couple of
    years, as sustainability has become more of
    a pressing issue for Bellerín, he’s shopped less
    and less – “I’ve really stopped from buying
    clothes as I used to do before; when I do, it’s


like, second-hand” – but still. Bellerín’s brand
is, at least in part, a fashion brand.
Fashion is something of a family business
for Bellerín. He grew up in a small coastal
town in Catalonia, an hour outside Barcelona,
surrounded by sewing machines, patterns,
fabric. His mother, Maty Moruno, is a pattern
cutter and seamstress; his grandmother and
grandfather ran a small fashion retail business,
making clothes from scratch and selling them
in their own shop. “If I wasn’t playing football,
I was in the little workshop, where they were
making clothes. The times when it was raining
and I was stuck at my grandma’s house, she
used to have a really big old sewing machine
that used to make so much noise. I used to
love playing with it. She used to go so crazy
because I could have hurt myself.”
I ask when he first became aware of
wanting to dress in a certain way. “The first
time I really, really tried was when I was

I


Jacket, £49.99,
vest, £9.99,
and trousers,
£34.99, all
H&M Edition by
Héctor Bellerín

Celebrating an Arsenal goal against Liverpool last September

PREVIOUS SPREAD: DAVID PRICE/GETTY IMAGES, PA, GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES, LANDMARK MEDIA

Free download pdf