December 21, 2006

For England's footballers, the World Cup was a disappointment. But for their wives and girlfriends it was a result. With their fake tans, blinding teeth and £3,000 handbags, the likes of Coleen, Alex and Abi have become celebrities in their own right. Lucy Siegle heads for Liverpool and the lurid world of Wag Central


There is some contention as to who came up with the ‘Wag’ epithet, Wag being shorthand for ‘wives and girlfriends’ of the England football squad. The Daily Mail claims it coined the seminal anthropological term during Euro 2004 in Portugal. But arguably it was Grazia, the women’s weekly magazine that turned it into a full phenomenon during this summer’s World Cup.

To Baden-Baden and the World Cup, the Wags brought their babies, and their mums and dads (MADs) to mind the babies; they wore city shorts with heels, carried must- have handbags, made use of the official touring spray tanning team and one or two stood on tables in the local hostelry singing ‘I Will Survive’. At the hotel, on the half-hour they got up and promenaded around the swimming pool, never actually getting in the water (unlike their boys, proper Scouse girls don’t do sport).

Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Tweedy, two footballers’ wives with high careers, apparently tried to distance themselves from the scene, Tweedy later making pointed remarks as to how she didn’t need to borrow boyfriend Ashley Cole’s ‘plastic to go shopping’ because she had her own. But their independent woman stance didn’t have the appeal they might have hoped for, as everyone had fallen for the Wags, their devil-may-care fecklessness and mountains of paramour-bought handbags. In particular, we took to our collective, Grazia-reading bosom the three Liverpool Wags: Coleen McLoughlin (engaged to Wayne Rooney), Alex Curran (engaged to Steven Gerrard) and Abigail Clancy, ‘on-off’ girlfriend of Peter Crouch.

When new England manager Steve McClaren banned the whole Cavalliclad carnival from all future tournaments on the grounds that they were a distraction, he sounded like Adam and his weaselly serpent sidekick blaming original sin on a collection of Fake Bake-tanned, fun-loving Eves. Anyway, did they crumble, did they lay down and die? No they did not.

The Wags are enormously intimidating to southern scruffs like me and, as I am dispatched to meet them at the Scouserati night of the year, Cricket boutique’s fashion show, I am practically quaking in my very last-season boots. This year, there’s even more pressure on the night as the venue, the revamped Liverpool Town Hall, can seat only 300. Given the store has a customer base of thousands, aside from all the Wags and Emmerdale starlets that need to be accommodated, I am truly in possession of a scorchingly hot ticket.

It’s an inauspicious start as I arrive in the soon to be Capital of Culture. Assimilation is going to be difficult. For starters, there is some consternation among the organisers that I do not have time for a spray tan and instead I’m issued with a bottle of self-tan to apply myself. In Liverpool these days, this passes for a standard greeting to pasty southerners.

Luckily there is plenty of time for a non-invasive facelift at the OC, Liverpool’s new central spa that caters for professional women, who apparently want to maintain Wag-like grooming standards but only have a 15-minutes window. Later that night, I meet a 35-year-old property lawyer who declares the Scouse Wags (more than 10 years her junior), her personal icons. “Their style, the clothes they wear, fits with the revamp and regeneration of this city and the build-up to the Capital of Culture,” she tells me.

Wag style has even spawned its own verbs. Going out? Then you get ‘Cricketed up’. If you’re used to the minimal interiors preferred by most retailers of luxury goods, where a £700 handbag is displayed on a lit plinth, Cricket is a bit of a shock. But the really striking thing is the volume of customers making a pilgrimage up the hallowed stairs (downstairs is menswear). The changing rooms are like revolving doors and I can honestly say I’ve seen slower Saturdays at Top Shop. Shoes and boots are mixed in with a Juicy Couture children’s range, and Juicy dog beds in powder blue peek out from beneath the rails. One after another, children, ordinary girls, Emmerdale starlets and even grandmothers leave clutching their distinctive carrier bag.

Contrary to popular belief, directional boutiques have never been the sole preserve of the south. For 35 years Rita Britton from Pollyarmas in Barnsley has been selling Issey Miyake, Costume National, etc, to a fashion-literate crowd north of Watford. Justine Mills, the fabled owner of Cricket, reminds me a little of Rita. At 33, she is the Wags’ older sister, constantly on the shop floor, where customers ask for her, dispensing advice and adding accessories.

Mills was doing her A-levels when she filled in for a friend one Saturday at a menswear shop and scored the highest sales of the day. By 19, she was managing a posh menswear store in Southport and began going on buying trips. She instinctively understood that her customers in the northwest would pay for good design, so brought in jackets priced at an unprecedented £900 – they flew off the rails in hours.

Coleen was first ‘papped’ in her unflattering school parka, when the press found out she was Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend. “She even made parkas fashionable again,” notes Jane Bruton. But in reality, Coleen wasn’t as fashion un-savvy as suggested. She was just 15 when she started hanging around Cricket – her friend Lindsey is now a shop assistant there. Justine Mills has helped to lead her through her transformation from schoolgirl to last year’s, admittedly rather awkward, shoot for Vogue.

The shop shifts a lot of stock, but there are plenty that look snootily down their (usually southern) noses at the whole enterprise and Wag style lists. “Actually, they are so out of date,” says Justine, who has no truck with that kind of snobbery. “The image that they have of the Wag style being Dolce & Gabbana and Dior glasses is more the Sheryl Gascoigne era than Coleen.” In fact, she pronounces next season’s Dolce & Gabbana offerings completely hideous and refuses to give them shop room. There is no Dior either, I note. There is plenty of room, however, for the more extrovert D Squared, and newcomer Kirsty Doyle, whose unashamedly glamorous coats and silky shirts prompt cheers from the home crowd at the fashion show.

By 8pm, a gratifyingly large crowd of paparazzi is assembled round the entrance to Liverpool’s town hall. Abigail Clancy, one of the models for the night, goes through the rails, buying about 50 per cent of the clothes she’s about to model. The boutique doesn’t do loans, even to its chief Wags, and competition is fierce to get the best picks of the season. Everyone, it seems, relies on Justine to keep a mental note of who is wearing what to avoid embarrassing clashes. Tonight, it’s safe to say, everyone is Cricketed

Kerrie Fowler, married to Robbie Fowler, bought her first Cricket outfit, a Missoni dress, eight years ago for a New Year’s party. “I’m big into Balenciaga at the moment, so I buy a lot from Justine.” Both she and Jude Cisse agree that the younger Wags are under pressure to look the part. “The competition has increased over the past few years to get the right outfits. We’re lucky we’re older so we can be a bit more laid”

Within half an hour the bar area is crammed full of mahogany-coloured women, sporting shiny blonde manes, propped up on Louboutin heels. This is predominantly a girls’ night out – not least because all the premiership players are at home, before the next day’s Manchester United v Liverpool match. A rare brunette; actor Sheree Murphy (aka Mrs Harry Kewell), arrives in Balenciaga; Coleen appears in a circle of her friends and family: But it’s really only Alex Curran’s arrival that causes heads to turn. She stands resplendent in a silver Lurex Biba dress that I’d seen hung on a special rail in Cricket, presumably out of the reach of any wannabes or rivals.

The consensus seems to be that tonight Alex has got it right, but this is not always the case. In fact, men who sold atomic secrets during the Cold War have attracted less opprobrium than Alex Curran’s fashion mistakes. A faux pas happened just a few weeks ago, according to the tabloids – something to do with red shorts and a black blouse – but the really notorious sartorial shocker was a canary-yellow Juicy Couture tracksuit teamed with moon boots. “Oh yeah, the tracksuit,” recalls Mills. “After she’d been on every worst-dressed list, we got orders from all over the country.” So much for the opinions of style gurus.