quarterback comeback ep. 17
clear eyes, full heart, can't lose
The quarterback always comes back. It’s an American archetype with stamina. There are the shoulder pads, the black grease marks under the eyes, the jockstraps, the helmets, the weirdly shaped balls. It’s the costume of attraction, patriotism, and the sort of grit that is thinly disguised ego. If the hot-rodent-boyfriend needed multiple articles to convince you of its validity, the hot-quarterback needs exactly none.
Bruce Weber 1998
It’s the trope that gets reinterpreted over and over again. In the early aughts, Bruce Weber used it to sell us on Abercrombie & Fitch. Now ERL has reimagined the quarterback in his own way. Interview put Kim K on the cover in a jockstrap with an American flag— just to really drive home a sense of nostalgia for something that never was. Kendrick coached ahead of the Super Bowl halftime show.
ERL, SS ‘21
Nadia Lee Cohen for Interview Mag, September 2022
Kendrick Lamar, Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show
Waifish models wear numbered jerseys in editorials. Rappers wear shoulder pads on stage like armor, in the same way pop stars insist on sequined hot shorts. It’s everywhere you look because it never went away. The symbolism of football isn’t nuanced, it’s just shorthand for nostalgia, or America, or strength.
Pop Magazine SS ‘06 ‘Suburbia’ by Alasdair Mclellan
ERL ‘22
Thue Nørgaard, Document Journal F/W 2023
So what happens to the quarterback when America isn’t feeling very land of the free? Maybe it’ll get reappropriated and we’ll see the internet’s prom queen Addison Rae rolling around in a jersey singing about touchdowns (When you score, I’m your girl tell them baby— I wear your numbers when I go to sleep. On the field, running fast, touchdown for me. Quarterback, call me back, I’ll be your freak). Or maybe we’ll get lucky and see Doechii in Thom Browne and shoulder pads on the cover of Vogue. Or maybe it will go the way of raw milk and red caps.
Regardless, I still can’t care about football— beyond this next image of a boy looking TOUGH in bubblewrap.
Packaging, PTG, March 2000
Tough, right?