The whole point of a little black dress is supposed to be that you can wear it to any occasion and fit in. So, after a protracted wardrobe crisis, I have chosen, for a midweek footballers’ wives’ night out, a simple, beaded, knee-length black crêpe cocktail dress. My plan is that I will blend into the crowd, all the better to observe.
Big mistake. Huge mistake, in fact. Walking into Cricket, the Liverpool boutique where owner Justine Mills is drinking pink champagne with Harry Kewell’s wife Sheree Murphy, Lesley Owen (sister of Michael, and fiancée of Richie Partridge, a Liverpool player), and Malene Holst, girlfriend of Liverpool defender Djimi Traore, I blend in like a black cat in a butterfly house.
Colourfully dressed and impeccably groomed (Owen has had acrylic nails since she was 14, she tells me), these girls flutter about the store in green and white and pink, like a little flock of Tinkerbells.
And while their clothes and handbags are expensive (they are all in designer jeans, Murphy has a Ghost top, Owen a Balenciaga ”baby Lariat” bag), these pale into insignificance next to the jewellery.
Everyone is wearing an impressive diamond necklace. Holst has an enormous Jacob & Co watch studded with dozens of diamonds, while Lesley’s watch, although slightly smaller, is impossible to miss because the face is so encrusted with bling that she has to hold it above her head at a certain angle to be able to read the time through the diamonds.
I am here because the first ladies of football — headed, since Victoria Beckham moved to Madrid, by Wayne Rooney’s fiancée Coleen McLoughlin — have become a national obsession. McLoughlin’s appearance in this month’s Vogue has become a media story in its own right. And anyone who has followed tabloid tales of her pom-pommed, rabbit-fur mukluk boots, or the canary yellow tracksuit worn by Alex Curran (soon to be Mrs Steven Gerrard) will have noticed that one name crops up again and again — Cricket.
Cricket, a two-floor designer boutique in Liverpool, has become an unofficial footballers’ wives’ headquarters, not just for Liverpool and Everton players’ wives, but for the Manchester teams too. McLoughlin is reported to have spent £20 000 there this season. Owen comes ”about once a week.It’s a meeting point — we come here and then go for lunch at the Living Room”.
The store has become such a mecca that paparazzi are stationed almost permanently outside and each day at 4pm, gaggles of schoolgirls come in to browse and, if they’re lucky, star-spot. They all beg to be given one of the distinctive, animal print Cricket carrier bags, which have become a status symbol in their own right. One recently sold on Ebay for £25.
Justine Mills, the owner of Cricket — which started life 14 years ago as a menswear store, hence the now rather incongruous name — has seen her business boom since expanding into womenswear six years ago. Mills sees the association with football as inevitable: ”This city has always been famous for football, so if you’re the premier boutique here, you’re bound to be linked with the game.”
Along with the players’ lounges, Cricket forms the hub of these women’s social life. Recently, Mills arranged a girls’ night out to a Kylie Minogue concert, which Murphy describes as ”like a hen night. We went in a stretch Humvee and we were all wearing bunny ears and dancing all the way there”.
Behind the sparkle, however, the footballer’s wife look has shifted in the year since Beckham gave up her Queen Bee crown to move to Spain. The latest style — epitomised by McLoughlin and Alex Curran, and Cricket’s other top customers — is younger, more colourful, sunnier and more upbeat. Pucci, Missoni and Matthew Williamson have taken over from Gucci and Dolce. Mills describes the look as ”very LA, very Paris Hilton”.
The new footballers’ wives look is not a sophisticated one. As Alexandra Shulman, the editor of Vogue, notes, McLoughlin ”wears a more expensive version of what most 19-year-old girls would like to wear. She wears the Chloe smock top, instead of the Topshop version.”
But there is a more sophisticated side to Cricket. The same Chloe Paddington bag that has been a sell-out in London’s hippest boutiques is a must-have here.
Alongside the rails of sunshine-coloured Juicy Couture are avant-garde naval-inspired trousers by Balenciaga (£605) and an edgy, deconstructed, mesh-and-satin mushroom-coloured Stella McCartney dress for £3 000.
Although they are invariably known as footballers’ wives, they are, in fact, more often, footballers’ fiancées. At a recent party, every other girl I met was engaged. At first I kept asking them, politely, when they were getting married, but I was met, more often than not, with a blank stare. The message seems to be, once you’ve got a gorgeous Tiffany sugar-cube on your finger, why bother with a boring old gold band and a piece of paper?
But some footballers’ wives are quite different. I met Steve McManaman’s wife Victoria. She looks the part, with Barbie good looks, candyfloss hair fastened with girlish clips and stripy pink Missoni dress, but she is a barrister, and is keen to point out that many footballers’ wives do have careers; it’s just that the paparazzi prefer to wait outside Cricket for pictures of girls laden down with carrier bags than snap her in a suit on her way to work. — Â