Premier League footballer Dominic Calvert-Lewin as queer fashion icon

In recent years, English Premier League striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin has begun to pursue a parallel career as a fashion model for a range of haute couture designers. In this article, I discuss specific images from the football player’s fashion shoots, using a queer visual analysis methodology. I argue that these images display a camp aesthetic, through which Calvert-Lewin performs a hybrid form of masculinity. I suggest that while in many ways his performance disrupts the gender binary that is constructed through dress, in others it reinforces the power and privilege on which that binary rests. My article brings together scholarship from fashion studies and masculinity studies, representing the first academic investigation of Calvert-Lewin as a fashion icon. It is also the first academic study from a fashion perspective of the current generation of professional footballers. The article contributes to fashion and masculinity studies in three ways: first, by broadening knowledge of how members of the current generation of players use fashion and dress to (re)negotiate masculinity and male subjectivity; second, by extending our understanding of how men’s fashion and fashion imagery queer masculinity and, third, by adding to scholarly debates on the power dynamics underpinning hybrid masculinity.