World Cup: world-class hair

If only Serbia and Montengro played as well as forward Danijel Ljuboja’s hair looks, they would still be alive in the World Cup. We especially like the look of Ljuboja’s locks when pictured next to the world’s roundest ball. Separated at birth?

 

Photos: 6 rows above: 1st row: Xavier, Portugal; David Beckham, United Kingdom. 2nd row: Umit Davala, Turkey. 3rd row: Clint Mathis, USA; Taribo West, Nigeria; Ahn Jung Wang, Korea. 4th row: Ronaldinho, Brazil; Carles Puyol, Spain. 5th row: Kazayuki Toda, Japan. 6th row: Ronaldo, Brazil

Photos: Loco, Angola; Christian Wilhelmsson, Sweden

Now that we have seen 16 of the 32 teams in the World Cup, some early favorites are emerging for the coveted Worst Hair award.

Angola defender Loco takes the Ronaldo-circa-2002 look to a new level with the half-cut dreadlock look. Do you suppose he got a discount for only having 50% of his hair cut?

Sweden’s Christian Wilhelmsson takes us back to the 80s with an impressive flowing rat tail (couldn’t find an actual picture of it, but this one gives you an idea of what that dude is all about.) that could very well poke out an eye or two in his next match.

Who will emerge to challenge these players for this prestigious honor? We should know more after the next few days.

Djibril Cissé, France

Bleach It Like Beckham

By ERIC WILSON
New York Times | June 15, 2006

THERE was nothing exciting about David Beckham’s hair.

After England’s 1-0 victory in its World Cup opener against Paraguay on Saturday, won by a free kick mistakenly rebounded into the goal by the opposing captain, the team was exhausted. A bigger disappointment, for aesthetically minded soccer fans, was that David Beckham’s tresses — normally the beau ideal of the soccer world’s array of aggressively directional haircuts — were just tired. His previous dos have included a frosted fauxhawk, blond cornrows and a confection of rooster’s peaks, but on Saturday Mr. Beckham’s hair was, like his game, neatly prostrate and minimally styled. Mere gel, in soccer, is a letdown.

”The British players are tidied up now,” said Howard McLaren, the creative director of the Bumble & Bumble salon in Manhattan. Was there a tinge of disappointment in his voice at the recollection of what Mr. Beckham’s fauxhawk did for men’s grooming during the last World Cup in 2002, when the look was widely imitated?

”If you look at the long hair of players from Argentina and Brazil, they are constantly pulling it out of their mouths, which can be distracting,” Mr. McLaren added. ”But they are willing to pay that price for the way their hair looks.”

When you are viewed from overhead on a television set for hours on end, hairstyle is substance.

American sports fans are largely unaccustomed to the personal style that is routinely on display at the World Cup. But from now until the final game on July 9, the soccer peacocks will be difficult to ignore. Viewers will see glimpses of Angola’s defender, Loco, who wears only a beanstalk patch of braids sprouting from his forehead; Christian Wilhelmsson, a midfielder from Sweden, who has unruly blond spikes and a retro rat’s tail; Danijel Ljuboja, a forward from Serbia and Montenegro whose dye design recalls the white stripes of a skunk; and Fernando Torres, a forward from Spain, who arrived in Germany with a bleach-mottled mullet. When the Japanese team lined up against Australia on Monday, the field looked like a hairstylist convention — progressive dye jobs versus chippy spikes.

That so much attention is paid to players’ hair and to the customary postgame swapping of jerseys no doubt contributes to soccer’s standing in the United States as a vanity sport, even though it is the most popular one in other parts of the world. But with the global exposure of the World Cup, players who are famous in their home countries — and emulated by local fans — are now influencing style around the world, setting trends, endorsing designer brands and appearing in advertising campaigns.

”There’s a euphoria about soccer players like I’ve never seen here before,” said Timothy Everest, the London tailor who outfitted Mr. Beckham for his wedding. ”When they were doing the walkabout here before the World Cup, it was reminiscent of the Beatles.”

Soccer players are passionately studied on and off the field by billions of fans, and designers and athletic clothing brands have responded by courting the most stylish ones. Mr. Beckham has been both celebrated and reviled as soccer’s most famous clotheshorse, capable of igniting debates on diamond earrings and multistrand beaded necklaces for men, but he is not alone.

There were fashionista footballers before him — George Best and Charlie George in England and Charlie Miller in Scotland, to name a few. And many more have since turned up in the front rows of fashion shows and posed seductively for men’s wear designers, pushing Mr. Beckham, the once unrivaled star of metrosexuality, to fashion’s equivalent of the bench.

”I really like Hide Nakata,” said Italo Zucchelli, the men’s wear designer for Calvin Klein. Mr. Zucchelli is Italian and therefore is familiar with the international stars of soccer, among them Hidetoshi Nakata, a 29-year-old midfielder playing for Japan.

Mr. Nakata was a star player in the Asian leagues before he was recruited to an Italian team in 1998, and his style and interest in fashion often draw comparisons to Mr. Beckham. After Mr. Nakata began turning up at the runway shows of Giorgio Armani in Milan and Dior in Paris, often wearing racy T-shirts under a blazer or a fur-trimmed bomber jacket, he became known as the ”Asian Becks.”

”Beyond the fact he is a really beautiful man, he has a very nice style,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”He plays with fashion like all of them now, but in a cooler, more sophisticated way than many others.”

Other designers and fashion houses — John Galliano, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and H&M — have cited soccer as inspiration for their collections, some claiming that soccer players have more style than other athletes. When Mr. Armani announced this month that he would outfit the English team for their appearances off the field at the World Cup, he said, ”Footballers are today’s new style leaders.” This is a bold endorsement from a designer who has usually expended his marketing energy on dressing blue-chip movie stars.

Mr. Armani cast the Brazilian midfielder Kaká in his new ads for Emporio Armani, and Andriy Shevchenko, a forward from Ukraine, in an ad for Armani Collezioni. Mr. Shevchenko, 29, has an interest in promoting Mr. Armani’s designs, as he also operates the Armani Collezioni and Armani Jeans franchises in Kiev. Dolce & Gabbana, which designs uniforms for the Milan team’s regular season, has cast five of its members in a provocative new underwear campaign, posing in a locker room.

Greg Williams, a partner at the media consulting company art/words/pictures and a former editor of Arena magazine, wrote about the relationship between soccer players and fashion for the catalog of an exhibition on sports and culture that is opening on Wednesday in Florence called ”Human Game: Winners and Losers.” Mr. Williams compared the athletes’ celebrity to that of actors and musicians: ”Fifteen years ago you’d hire a young white rapper with a six-pack named Marky Mark. Today you hire a Swedish soccer player with a panther tattooed on his abdomen.”

Mr. Zucchelli noted that Calvin Klein hired that model, Freddie Ljungberg, for its underwear campaign because soccer players were becoming more like media stars, especially in Europe where the company is expanding. The ads not only enhanced Mr. Ljungberg’s celebrity, they digitally altered his physique. (No, not that. Mr. Ljungberg’s panther tattoo is actually on his back.)

”Playing with fashion allows you to create a character out of yourself,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”People respond to that.”

The current interest in soccer players echoes the intense branding that has become pervasive in sporting events with a high international profile. Zinédine Zidane of the French team is the face of Dior’s Eau Savage, and Lukas Podolski of Germany sells Axe body spray.

Certainly the athletes are aware that a commercially appealing package can reap financial benefits. ”What we have seen, especially in Europe, is this sort of fashion-conscious persona many of them have created,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”There is this very hairstyled player with supercontrived, huge sunglasses and a lot of jewelry. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.”

If the players were not so talented, the level of style competitiveness would threaten to eclipse the sport. Ronaldinho, the Brazilian held up as the world’s most talented player, wears his hair long and wavy, pulled back to reveal gaudy earrings with his number in diamonds, and adorably pulls his cuffs down over his hands during warm-ups.

Djibril Cissé, a 24-year-old striker from France, is among the most visually imposing players, often appearing with platinum-dyed facial hair. He is also wont to remove his shirt during play (and shorts in the case of a pinup calendar) to reveal a set of angel’s wings tattooed onto his back. Mr. Cissé was sidelined from the World Cup last week when he broke his leg.

There are American athletes who are known for their flamboyant style — Dennis Rodman, the Williams sisters or Johnny Weir — but in this country there is a puritanical tendency to play down individuality. Think of the constant nattering about hem lengths in basketball and resistance to facial hair in baseball, which is even codified by the New York Yankees’ stubble ban, known informally as the Mattingly rule.

Soccer players embrace their eccentricities, a tendency that Mr. McLaren of Bumble & Bumble suggests is explained by the pride of those with humble roots who have achieved international success.

”Usually it is the normal kids who become talented,” he said. ”It’s not like a tennis star whose parents spend millions training them to become a star. It’s the more common person who has contact with the streets at a young age. They are exposed more to street-level culture. They tend to pick up on that a bit more.”

It’s a theory, but it does not take into account the styles born of other sports. Just Tuesday, a television report noted a rise in sales of capri pants in Spain, linking the phenomenon to the tennis victory of Rafael Nadal. He wore them at the French Open on Sunday.

Hair History: 2002 World Cup

Hair in the many colours of the rainbow. Hair in all shapes and sizes. No hair.
However you look at it, hair was the fashion statement of the 2002 World Cup.The short back and sides is out – except for losing teams. The Mohawk, the chin lock, the skinhead, the dreadlock, the 1970’s long flowing locks look – even some styles you’d never dare wear in the streets – were in.It seemed as though a player was as likely to arrive at a game with hair dye in his kit as his football boots.

Wacky Aki
What does it all mean? Is it just vanity or something deeper?

Top Japanese hair stylist Aki Watanabe, who does the hair of Japan’s French coach, Philippe Troussier, when he is in Tokyo, says that in the modern game hair has become the only way for a player to standout and express his individuality.Watanabe, whose salon is a magnet for Japanese and foreigners alike, says that as a result of the explosion of money in football through marketing and advertising contracts what a player wears is tightly controlled.“The only thing he has control over is his hair,” Watanabe told Reuters. “If he wants to make a statement that he is a warrior, he wears a mohawk. If he wants to say to opponents ‘Beware I am a hard man’, he shaves his head.”In short, hair can get you noticed! Watanabe says that in the era of football globalisation, where players have become mercenaries seeking the highest wages anywhere in the world, a stand-out hair style is a way to be noticed by talent scouts.“If you’re trying to break into the big time, you change your hair style or colour so you leap out from the other players on the field, not just with your skill but your look,” he added.

Chin lock

The award for the standout hair – singular – went to Nigerian defender Efe Sodje (pictured right): an example of a player still trying to be noticed and get into the big money bracket.Sodje, who used to play for Crewe Alexandra, sported a chin lock. The single-strand of beard, in the national colour of green, jutted out from his face at a gravity-defying, guaranteed to attract an opponent’s attention. “My wife spent hours doing it for me,” he said.

Beckham’s locks
Even for an established star like England captain and fashion icon David Beckham, his hair style causes as much comment as his ball skills.

In fact, he sets trends and he’s been copied by the likes of Japan’s Kazuyuki Toda (pictured left).Beckham’s ever-changing hairstyles always attract media attention. When Beckham, wearing a modified mohawk with a black stripe down the middle of his blond hair, was replaced midway through England’s 1-1 draw with Sweden, one fan commented: “He was obviously having a bad hair day.”

The Mullet returns
Even long hair is beginning to make a comeback both on and off the pitch.

Senegal’s French coach, Bruno Metsu (pictured right), and Cameroon’s German coach, Winfried Schaefer, both favoured shoulder-length locks.England’s goalkeeper David Seaman even joined in the anti-fashion race by sporting a ponytail for the last few seasons.

Just dying to play
Hair colour, not style, has become the hallmark of 2002 World Cup co-hosts Japan and South Korea as much as their rise as Asian football powers.The Japan team sported some seven hair colours from several shades of brown, via the bright crimson, once orange, of midfielder Kazuyuki Toda to the silver locks of midfielder Junichi Inamoto, hero of Japan’s surprise 2-2 draw with Belgium. South Korea’s multi-coloured hair took the team all the way to the semis!

Hair stylist Watanabe credits Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata with starting the present worldwide craze for standout hair.The naturally black haired Nakata dyed his hair red at the 1998 World Cup in France to catch the eye of European scouts.“A change of hair made all the difference to Nakata’s career,” says Watanabe.

Cool up top
Most players on both teams sport the clean cut, short back and sides that would make a 1950’s school sportsmaster proud but is unlikely to provoke a squeal from a 21st century teenage girl.

“He is just so kakkoii,” schoolgirl Saori Shinohara said on the eve of the tournament, using the Japanese word for “cool” to describe England captain Beckham.“Everything,” she replied, when asked what it was about David Beckham that she liked.So the lesson is – to get ahead in the World Cup, get a hairstyle!

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• L’Amour
• the world cup runneth over