A soccer star’s Birkin collection is turning heads at the World Cup

Erling Haaland captured ahead of a UEFA Champions League match between Manchester City and Real Madrid back in March. His enviable collection of luxury handbags has gained him new fans — as well as raised some eyebrows. (Aitor Alcalde/UEFA/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Norwegian striker Erling Haaland is used to attention. He’s six foot five inches with shoulder-length blonde hair that loudly gestures towards his Viking pedigree. He is also among the best soccer players in the world and has led his country’s men’s team to its first FIFA World Cup appearance in nearly three decades. But a couple of weeks ago, stylist and TikToker Jack Savoie pointed to something else Haaland is known for: his collection of Hermès bags.

“Have you seen Erling Haaland’s custom Birkins?” Savoie said in a video that quickly went viral. “Baby, buckle up.”

“OK the first thing I should say is that they’re not all Birkins,” Savoie said in a phone interview. Many of Haaland’s bags are actually Haut à Courroies (HAC), the model that the Birkin is based off, but with a slightly taller and narrower profile. That doesn’t do anything to dull the impact of Haaland’s collection, though.

In the video, with over 10 million views, Savoie spends several minutes breaking down the soccer star’s collection. There’s the special edition “Endless Road” HAC that he carried as he deplaned in North Carolina ahead of the World Cup. The bone colored bag is decorated with a patchwork of blue and gray leather that creates a mountain highway scene. There’s a moss-colored canvas HAC and a black-and-orange checkerboard HAC, and he was even spotted with his girlfriend Isabel Haugseng Johansen’s Birkin 25 tucked inside his HAC 50. “He was doubled up on Birkins, it was so chic,” Savoie said.

Haaland isn’t the only soccer player with a taste for Hermès: Argentinian superstar Lionel Messi has a pocket-festooned cargo HAC 40 he travels with, and Dutch defender and fashion aficionado Virgil van Dijk has a putty gray leather one. David Beckham seemingly has a small collection of XL-sized bags as well.

Fancy bags of all kinds are being seen at the World Cup. The French men’s national team — one of the favorites to win the entire tournament — arrived with HACs, as well as bags from Chanel and Louis Vuitton. French forward Marcus Thuram carried a bright green suede maxi flap bag from a Chanel collaboration with Pharrell Williams, while Rayan Cherki carried an oversized Hermès Kelly Maxi.

But Haaland’s enviable collection has triggered another round of discussion about men and the innocent handbag. The juxtaposition of the apex masculinity of the professional athlete with traditionally feminine signifiers of the luxury handbag does seem to short circuit something in the wider culture.

Photos of Haaland on the tarmac posted to social media were riddled with homophobia and comments questioning the striker’s masculinity. “I will never understand why a grown man wants to carry a handbag,” one Instagram user wrote.

Others were more supportive. “So this is how I find out Haaland is a baddie???” another commented.

“I think for so long people have been told what they can and can’t wear, but there’s this shift where people are saying, ‘I don’t care,’” said Savoie. “If it makes me happy, I’m going to wear this in the way I want to wear it.” He points to the increasing number of male athletes wearing high-end jewelry like Van Cleef & Arpels on the playing field, even if the specific pieces have more feminine associations.

The specific irony of something like an Hermès HAC being categorized as hyperfeminine is that the bag was created in the late 19th century as a carryall for horse riding equipment, much like the rest of the brand’s offerings at the time. The brand wouldn’t introduce a handbag specifically marketed towards women until many decades later, when it expanded its offerings beyond leather goods. “I think there’s just an increasing appreciation for beautiful things, gender aside,” Savoie said. “I don’t even know why these bags have genders.”

For all the chatter about his choices in handbags, Haaland doesn’t seem remotely bothered. He scored a pair of goals in each of his first two appearances in this year’s World Cup, making him only the sixth player to ever do so. Savoie said that the mix of his physical prowess with stellar taste only makes him more interesting to a wider swath of people, haters be damned. “It just adds another layer to his lore,” he said.

By Teddy Brown, CNN