'They laughed at first, then they were cool with it': Meet soccer's most stylish man

Published date23 November 2022
"I pay them to do that," he said with a smirk

Bellerín had recently returned to FC Barcelona after more than a decade as a defender for London's Arsenal team. When he was 16, he left Spain to compete in the Premier League; he barely spoke English at the time.

Now 27, he'd come back to La Liga as a zoomer's David Beckham: a world-famous athlete with a cockney accent, a rock-star mullet and a lucrative one-year contract with FC Barcelona. (Arsenal let Bellerín out of his contract at 11.58pm on September 1st; the summer transfer window closed at midnight. "In a moment, your whole life changes," he said of his move.)

In addition to having impressive stats – 14 goals, 41 assists and seven trophies over 321 career appearances – Bellerín is incredibly stylish, a reformed consumerist with an appreciation for Craig Green and Raf Simons, the facial symmetry of a movie star, and cool designer friends like Supriya Lele and KidSuper's Colm Dillane.

Bellerín has been featured in the British editions of Vogue, GQ and Esquire, and was recently on the cover of GQ Spain as one of 2022's men of the year. He's been called "the world's best dressed footballer" (Highsnobiety), "the edgiest footballer in the game" (Mr Porter) and "the ultimate pioneer of the football-fashion crossover" (i-D). He even managed to wear a transparent PVC trench coat by Maison Margiela – which he paired with a Prada bucket hat at Christopher Raeburn's fall 2019 show – without looking like a flasher.

"Clothes don't scare him the way they seem to scare a lot of dudes," Jonah Weiner, a founder of the style newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, said in an email. "He seeks out small labels doing interesting stuff off the radar, rummages through flea markets for gems, goes down eBay rabbit holes, and then he takes all the above and figures out how to put it together. You don't dig in that way if you just want a cheat code to looking 'stylish' – you dig if you really regard clothes as a form of self-expression and self-discovery."

In the spring of 2019, Virgil Abloh, then the men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton, hired Bellerín, an Arsenal fullback at the time and a member of the Spanish national team, to model a pair of bright pink shorts and a matching snakeskin hoodie at Paris Fashion Week. He was in Greece when he received the call, recovering from a torn anterior cruciate ligament, which kept him sidelined for 31 games.

As Bellerín waited backstage for his runway debut, 22nd in a line of 59 men, his heart raced, he said. The adrenaline was reassuring: It gets triggered every time he...

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