Picture this. It’s the summer season of 2006 on a glitzy road within the German spa city of Baden-Baden. A tan younger girl is framed by the flashing lights of paparazzi cameras. She’s sporting a newsboy cap, a cropped brand high, and a pair of bug-eye sun shades. She is just not an A-list actress, neither is she a pop star. She is the spouse of Jason Cundy, one among England’s high footballers. This girl is Lizzy Cundy, and after this journey her life won’t ever be the identical. After this, she’ll be without end often known as an unique WAG.
“I’ve by no means seen something prefer it,” the now 56-year-old, who was married to Cundy from 1994 till 2012, tells Glamour of the European obsession along with her and the guy wives and girlfriends {of professional} athletes. “Everyone wished to know what we had been doing. It simply went loopy. It was just like the Beatles.” One reminiscence stands proud. She and several other different WAGs had been strolling down a road of designer retailers, and the paparazzi actually “fell over themselves” to get the right shot.
“It was like the brand new rock stars had come to city,” she says.
Fast ahead to 2024, and related scenes are enjoying out at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium. Since starting her relationship with Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift has been enacting these now age-old WAG rituals—the pap walks, the fastidiously deliberate appears to be like, the all-too-visible VIP packing containers—simply as Cundy and her crew did almost 20 years earlier. And all throughout the nation, and throughout totally different sports activities, WAGs are breaking via in huge methods, constructing private manufacturers and getting well-known, with Swift supercharging an already rising pattern.
But to essentially comprehend our present fascination with the WAGs within the US, we have to go all the way in which again to the ladies who began all of it. Along with Cundy, the unique British soccer (for American readers, soccer) WAGs shot to fame in Baden-Baden in 2006, laying out the blueprint for WAGs to come back.
In the UK the WAG phenomenon was a brilliant however transient flame within the media panorama – one which was extinguished nearly as quickly because it was lit. By 2010 the unique group of wives and girlfriends had largely light out of the highlight, and no British WAG group ever actually rose up of their place. Nonetheless, their transient second of stardom modified movie star tradition for good.
Coleen McLoughlin and Alex Curran throughout England Players wives and girlfriends take pleasure in an evening out at restaurant and native bar.C. Uncle
An acronym for “wives and girlfriends,” the time period WAG first appeared within the early ’00s. Many level to a 2002 Telegraph article, which in flip credited the “employees on the Jumeirah Beach Club” with coining the nickname, because the time period’s first look. A gaggle of wives and girlfriends of the English nationwide soccer staff had been, on the time, “bonding” in Dubai forward of the World Cup. Among them had been Posh Spice, a.ok.a. Victoria Beckham (spouse of celebrity footballer David) and mannequin Katie Price, additionally identified by the stage title Jordan (then the girlfriend of Dwight Yorke).
Perhaps these girls, already celebrities in their very own proper, are a part of the rationale why the press started to concentrate to the companions of the nation’s soccer stars. The fascination continued: That 12 months ITV launched Footballers’ Wives, an over-the-top fictional drama full with a knock-off Posh Spice delightfully named Chardonnay Lane; it ran for 4 years.
But it wasn’t till 2006 that the WAG went really stratospheric. The World Cup kicked off in June, and because the gamers took to the pitch, 22 of their wives and girlfriends checked into the luxurious 1,000-pounds-a-night rooms at Brenner’s Park Hotel in Baden-Baden. Joining Cundy had been Beckham, rising Girls Aloud star Cheryl Tweedy (later spouse of Arsenal and Chelsea left-back Ashley Cole), Colleen McLoughlin (then the fiancée of Wayne Rooney, who stays England’s second-highest objective scorer), Alex Curran (spouse of Liverpool F.C. midfielder Steven Gerrard), Elen Rivas (then married to Frank Lampard, a midfielder for Chelsea F.C.), and Carly Zucker (girlfriend of midfielder Joe Cole).
Cundy and her cohort had been a brand new model of relatable movie star. Though Cundy had modeled for Cosmopolitan and Vogue previous to assembly her husband-to-be, Jason, when she was simply 19, she wasn’t well-known. The daughter of an artwork director for an promoting company, Cundy had gone to a Catholic college and lived a comparatively sheltered life. It turned out this made her solely extra interesting.
“Girls might actually relate to us,” Cundy says. “They thought, I could possibly be there; that could possibly be me. Everyone wished to know what we had been carrying, what we regarded like, what outfit we wore, what mascara we used.”
