Working-class masculinity and fashion: David Beckham, Del Boy and the representation of taste

This article uses a comedy sketch Only Fools and Horses: Beckham in Peckham (2014) as a point of departure to discuss ideas around the designation, embodiment and treatment of contemporary working-class masculinity. It uses this sketch to explore the relationship between working-class masculinity and fashion in the age of the metrosexual. The article considers the importance of the body to this relationship – the ways in which the middle-class eye of the mainstream media manages and maintains this classification via judgements of value and taste. Within the United Kingdom the class structure is susceptible to shifting patterns of classification, but with regard to masculinity and fashion, this article argues, media representations continue to be reductive and work to actively reinforce established stereotypes.