David Beckham for Boss Bodywear in an exclusive photo for Vogue.Photo: Courtesy of Boss
David Beckham is one of the most enduringly popular and gifted English soccer players of all time—so much so that the British press habitually calls him Golden Balls. He is also one of the most enduringly popular and gifted underwear models of all time. Tonight, more than a decade after declaring it was time to keep his pants on in public for good by retiring from the underwear circuit, Beckham unveiled his new Mert and Marcus lensed campaign for Boss One. Or as he put it: “Yep: I’m back in the game!”
We were in London’s Lightroom space, home to Vogue’s recent Inventing The Runway exhibition. The corridors on the way down into the cavernous, screen-walled venue were lined by some of the images of Beckham which, by the time this post is published, should be generating exactly the level of focus on its new bodywear range that Boss was hoping for. Or as the company’s CEO, Daniel Grieder, put it: “Bodywear is an iconic product group: and with this campaign, we aim to inspire customers and fans of the brand worldwide more than ever."
David Beckham for Boss Bodywear. Photo: Courtesy of Boss.
Beckham, for his part, name checked Grieder as the reason he’d decided to come out of his self-imposed underwear-exile to strip down and moisturize up for one last mission. “I'd said to my team so many times, ‘it doesn’t matter what it is, I'm not going back: I’m not doing another bodywear campaign.’ But when I sat down with Daniel and spoke with him about his vision and understood his passion, I was convinced.”
Tonight Beckham was joined by his wife Victoria (on extremely cheery form), their son Cruz and his partner Jackie Apostel, plus friends including Gordon Ramsay, Guy Ritchie (who himself once directed a Beckham underwear campaign movie), Gemma Chan, Mark Ronson and Jodie Turner Smith. The room filled and anticipation built as the guests drank Golden Martinis mixed in honor of Beckham and waited for the Trey Laird creative directed campaign movie to premiere. When it did, we whooped as a set-up that blended Rear Window, the Naked Guy (but here not Ugly) from Friends, and that classic man-ogling 1990s Diet Coke Break ad unfolded. It involved Beckham returning home to a curtainless high-rise Manhattan apartment doing what Beckham does—vigorous sets of pull-ups, long showers, moody middle-distance staring, sprawled-on-the sofa snoozing—while attired only in a pair of Boss One boxer-brief trunks (although not always). Meanwhile from across the block, a growing crowd of girls and guys objectified with glee.
David Beckham for Boss Bodywear. Photo: Courtesy of Boss.
“We really wanted to take it back to an old school underwear campaign,” he said before the film aired. Back in 2008—before the category ‘bodywear’ was even a thing—Beckham sparked his first bout of underwear mania courtesy of a campaign for Emporio Armani which, like this Boss campaign, was shot by Mert & Marcus. Beckham said: “Working with them has always been special, and I trust them. So when we started talking about this campaign and me getting back into underwear, I told Daniel that I wanted to work with them again. When I walked out on set they were like: ‘Here we go again!’”
Back in 2008 he confessed to feeling a little embarrassed about all the attention his first underwear campaign attracted, but tonight he said: “People are used to me doing this now! This is something I’ve been doing throughout my career, and I’ve never been afraid to push the boundaries. What we’ve done now I think, though, is to do that in a very elegant way.”
Beckham turns 50 this year, which makes this campaign an especially inspiring example for his fellow Gen X-vintage gentlemen, especially those for whom being objectified from across the block is nothing but a distant memory (OK, fantasy). So how did he get in such especially Boss-level, hot daddy form? “I came into this in the same way I approach everything else: I prepared well,” he said. “Because it doesn’t matter what age you are, if you feel good in your skin then you should be able to do anything.”
“Plus I trained!” he added: “To be honest, I’m always training, but for this I followed a 12-week regime: it was two workouts a day. I always train hard, but I was especially dedicated because I knew I was going into this.”
David Beckham for Boss Bodywear. Photo: Courtesy of Boss.
That training went hand-in-hand with a high-protein eating plan and a period of abstinence from alcohol. It was the food, Beckham said, that was especially challenging: “Because I love my food! And for this project to get in the best possible shape I cut out almost everything I love, including pizza, pasta, fried chicken, french fries… So at one point I said to my team: ‘The moment I walk off that set I’d love to be able to have a pizza, some fried chicken, and chips.’ And they did it! I walked off set, and they were standing there waiting for me. And actually it was the best pizza, fried chicken and chips I’ve ever eaten, still boxer-briefed up and tanned!”
There have been other greats in this game, several of them also soccer players. Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Freddie Ljungberg were all contenders. However when it comes to underwear modeling, the undisputed GOAT from the soccer world (and arguably the entire world, too) remains David Beckham, the Boss.