Footballers and Luxury Fashion – The Perfect Partnership
In a world where entertainment and celebrity now merge so frequently with fashion, it is no surprise that luxury brands are searching for those effective partners from other industries who can help them reach wider audiences.
When we think about this, then it makes sense that two of the biggest industries, fashion and football appear to be the perfect match. Countless professional footballers have become brand ambassadors and this trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Want to know more? Well, we’ve put together examples to show just how much influence footballers have and how much luxury fashion needs them. No matter if you work in fashion or ghost mannequin photography, this will provide useful insight into the future of marketing.
Let’s look at some examples
Son Heung-Min is a professional football player for Tottenham Hotspur and captains his national team, South Korea. What this sentence doesn’t tell us is that Son is an icon in South Korea and the wider region of Asia. With more than 7.2 million Instagram followers, Burberry decided it was time to snap him up as their new brand ambassador.
Marcus Rashford has not only become an influencer thanks to his status as a professional footballer at Manchester United but also because of his efforts outside of the sport. Having campaigned for action against child poverty, Burberry and Levi’s have signed Rashford up for campaigns that mix fashion with social topics.
Kylian Mbappé is one of the rising stars of football, leading the way at PSG and for France. Away from football, he has a significant following on Instagram, somewhere in the region of 72 million followers. This made it a no-brainer for Dior to make him a global ambassador in late 2021.
David Beckham is perhaps the first true football icon to make that connection with fashion and influence. Beckham has more than 74 million followers on Instagram and continues to have relationships with leading brands including Dior.
What about non-luxury brands?
We shouldn’t forget that the partnership between fashion and footballers isn’t limited to luxury brands. There are some massive fashion retailers who realised the role footballers can play in representing their products. In much the same way a ghost mannequin photographer may work with smaller brands and large luxury brands, opportunities are there to see.
You may have noticed that Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi haven’t been mentioned yet in this article. With a combined number of Instagram followers at around 800 million, Nike and Addidas made the decision to partner with these superstar footballers for obvious reasons.
Another interesting footballer to consider when discussing the impact of fashion and football is Jack Grealish. Signed for £100m by Manchester City in the last year, he is a leading English footballer who has partnered with both luxury and normal fashion brands. Grealish has agreed to partnerships with both BoohooMAN and Gucci in the past year.
A final thought
It is clear that footballers present the fashion industry with a fantastic way of connecting with huge audiences, in the tens and hundreds of millions. With a single post, a footballer is able to influence countless people across the globe and this is worth an awful lot of money to those fashion retailers and luxury brands.
