Girls and gays around the world are trolling straight blokes by appropriating a sacred item of stereotypical masculinity: the sports jersey. Touchdown! Score! Dummy-half! Thanks to It girls like Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Julia Fox who’ve all adopted the jersey trend, bloke-core aesthetic has jumped off TikTok feeds and onto the streets. Around Paris this Euro summer, fashionistas have been strutting the sidewalk in their finest soccer shirts, football guernseys and baseball tees.
“I think appropriating straight man culture is another step in the gay agenda,” says London tourist Alex Gilbert, 31. He’s wearing a mesh basketball-style shirt while op-shopping at the Saint-Ouen flea markets in the French capital. “I think gay stuff has proliferated everything.
So I think it’s more chic now to look heterosexual and kind of masculine but in a slightly gay-ish way. It’s a queer play on straight clothes.” It begs the question: what other stereotypical male accessories can we co-opt? G-shock watches? Threadbare Tradie briefs? Blokes, take this as a sign to do a thorough stocktake of your wardrobe immediately before whacking a padlock on the door.
Zoya Suinin, 17, says she had to turn to petty crime to keep up with the trend. “I stole it from my little brother,” she says of the red soccer shirt she started wearing two months ago. Other people are paying big bucks for sweaty old guernseys.
Eric Cossart who owns Fripe Vintage in the trendy Paris suburb of Le Marai.
