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Megan Rapinoe leaves the US women’s football team’s hotel in the Nike x Martine Rose suit. (Image: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)
Megan Rapinoe leaves the US women’s football team’s hotel in the Nike x Martine Rose suit. (Image: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)

OPINIONSportsJuly 25, 2023

The US women’s football team left their hotel and my soul left my body

Megan Rapinoe leaves the US women’s football team’s hotel in the Nike x Martine Rose suit. (Image: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)
Megan Rapinoe leaves the US women’s football team’s hotel in the Nike x Martine Rose suit. (Image: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)

I was prepared for the excitement of the Fifa Women’s World Cup. I was not prepared for The Suit.

On Saturday morning I went shopping with my husband to buy him some new clothes. I sat next to a rack of men’s suits as he tried on some perfectly nice jerseys. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed someone emerge from a changing room, trying a new suit on. I didn’t give it a second thought or a second look. It was a man in a perfectly fine suit.

Half an hour after leaving Dress Smart, I innocently opened Instagram as we drove home, perfectly nice jerseys bagged up in the back of the car. A friend had posted a video of the US women’s football team leaving their Auckland hotel before their game with Vietnam. I watched that video approximately 193 times, growing more and more fixated on the team’s formalwear with every viewing.

The rest of my Saturday was spent on a feverish research mission to discover everything I could about The Suit.

The Suit is a collaboration between British designer Martine Rose and Nike. It’s part of a gender-free collection that includes a trench coat, shirt and accessories.

I initially thought the jacket was double-breasted – a bold choice for visitors to a country where that look is the sole preserve of Winston Peters. With unwavering certainty, I can tell you that it’s not that association that caused my jaw to drop to the floor. 

I’m now not sure if they even are double-breasted. The buttons are hidden – deliberately, according to Rose – to preserve the suit’s sleek silhouette. I wondered if it was the suit’s sleek quality that had sent me spinning. I tested this theory by looking at pictures of otters and Ian Thorpe in his swimming suit. Nothing.

The fabric is jacquard. I didn’t notice this when I first saw The Suit, but read about it later, nodding wisely, muttering about the weave. Is it the weave that’s commanded me? Or the slightly military blue colourway? I don’t know what a colourway is, but I’ve seen it used before in fashion commentary. If anything, that colour should put me off, burdened as I am with a distaste for the US military complex.

Members of the US Women’s football team Kristie Mewis, Naomi Girma and Lynn Williams in the Martine Rose x Nike suit.

By Saturday evening, I was being sent unsolicited Instagram posts featuring more photos of the team in the suit. Each fresh piece of content was a clue on a quest to unlock the precise qualities that elevated the suit to stratospheric heights. One particular collection of photos taken by Hannah Peters as the team arrived at Eden Park elicited an audible gasp. I’ve since been told it was a groan. I may have also yelled “US of Slay” without a hint of irony.

Somewhere between my 95th and 97th loop of the video, a friend noted that the suit is elevated because of who’s wearing it. He was specifically referring to the footage of Megan Rapinoe leaving the hotel who, as he correctly observed, walks like the President (capital P), complete with a salute and bonafide sports star swagger. His note on the walk drew me into a forensic examination of the trousers, which I initially thought were bootcut – a bold choice for visitors to a country where that iconic style remains the sole preserve of Glassons circa 1997. Zooming into the photos I downloaded from Nike’s website (to be saved to a hard drive and buried with me), I now see they’re not. 

From the trousers I shifted to the shoes, also a Martine Rose x Nike collaboration. Based on the hundreds of comments I read, the shoes are a bit divisive, but the slightly squared toe elevates them beyond sportswear and into realms where I imagine people walk on water.

I’m not sure I’m qualified to pinpoint what it is about The Suit, aesthetically at least, that’s gripped me so. With the exception of a comment about Jacinda Ardern’s earrings in 2020, I have no pedigree in writing about fashion. I have written almost next to nothing about sport. Nonetheless, I am incredibly comfortable announcing that The Suit sets a new bar for team formalwear for all sports codes, irrespective of gender, and a new bar for suiting.

Teams have suffered for years wearing bland or radically “inventive” designs that we all delight in criticising while watching opening ceremonies. Nothing about this suit feels disempowering or diminishing. It’s also not just a well-tailored suit. Rose’s design makes it feel like it belongs to a sports team without making it a sports team uniform.  

We are well past women’s suits “having a moment”. There’s no real novelty factor in women wearing them anymore, and certainly nothing scandalous about it. I stand willing to accept charges of being superficially engaged with women’s sport by commenting on what the US women’s football team are wearing. It’s a common form of reductionism experienced by women. The US women’s football team are genuine sporting superstars and deserve to be celebrated for the game they play and the strides they’ve made in working towards pay equity.

But women in sport still battle ancient diktats about what they should wear while competing on the field or court. It wasn’t until this year that the Football Ferns were allowed to ditch white shorts as part of their playing kit, an acknowledgment that half the population menstruates once a month. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club also made a similar concession for the first time at Wimbledon last month. 

Just as sport is political, so too is clothing. There is still something subversive about the wearing of a suit by people who have had to conform to standards of dress, often ascribed by gender, for centuries. When that suit is as jaw-dropping as the one I’ve now spent days losing my mind over, it says something about the heights women’s sport is hitting. That suit is no afterthought; it’s a considered and elevated decision. Those athletes are as entitled to convey their dominance and power as men are. Sometimes, what we wear is part of doing that. Sometimes clothing is ceremonial armour.

As I hoovered up suit content all Saturday afternoon, a pig at a fashion trough, my husband mentioned my birthday was coming up and that the collection would be on sale from July 25. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I would never…”

But maybe I would. This drive-by suiting may have altered me at a molecular level. If you see me in spring, sporting a new Martine Rose x Nike trench coat, a sports star swagger to my step, you will know that I am that ridiculous, and The Suit was that powerful.

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Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large
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Dan Carter moments before he is sued for intellectual property theft by Dolby Audio (Image: Archi Banal)
Dan Carter moments before he is sued for intellectual property theft by Dolby Audio (Image: Archi Banal)

BusinessJuly 24, 2023

I secretly wore Dan Carter’s signature scent for a day. Here’s what people said about it

Dan Carter moments before he is sued for intellectual property theft by Dolby Audio (Image: Archi Banal)
Dan Carter moments before he is sued for intellectual property theft by Dolby Audio (Image: Archi Banal)

The reviews are in, and there’s one word that keeps on coming up.

Dan Carter’s signature scent, like most other celebrity fragrances, is hard to take as seriously as it wants to be taken. It’s also hard to judge objectively – unless, of course, you don’t know it’s Dan Carter’s signature scent you’re smelling. 

In fact, the only way to provide a truly honest and accurate review of DC10 Sport, available exclusively at Chemist Warehouse, would be to wear it in the office without telling anybody and report how people reacted.

This is my mission today. The aim is simple: to provide a blank canvas for the scent to be judged on its own merits. A blank canvas lingering suspiciously in the office kitchen and other communal areas, reeking of DC10 Sport.

8.45am I visit Chemist Warehouse on my way to work. A small but prominent DC10 Sport display is on the left as I enter the store, next to a larger display with fragrances from Kylie Minogue, Sarah Jessica Parker and Michael Bublé. Deeper into the fragrance section, the former All Black shares the men’s sports shelf with the likes of David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo and the late Shane Warne.

“Wow, new product,” remarks the young man at the counter. This feels pointed somehow. Chemist Warehouse opens at 8am and today is the first day DC10 Sport has been on sale. I suspect I may be the first person in the world to buy Dan Carter’s signature scent in store. 

9.00am DC10 Sport comes in a serious-looking matte black box with shiny embossed print, projecting a luxury beyond its $49.99 price tag. It was not designed to be unboxed in an office toilet cubicle, but here we are. I apply a full spray to my throat, then another to my wrist, then several more in the air to ensure full body coverage. The smell is immediate and stifling. It transports me back to the changing rooms at my high school gym, to a world of satin boxer shorts and extreme self-consciousness. There is no other way to say this: it smells a lot like Lynx body spray.

9.05am What did I expect it to smell like? Dan Carter may have cultivated an interest in the finer things in life in recent years, wearing leather jackets and drinking wine, but you can tell that at heart he is still an uncomplicated, Lynx-wearing teenage boy. I imagine him at the Chemist Warehouse fragrance testing facility, sampling scent after scent after scent and feeling nothing at all, before finally sniffing this one and feeling a profound sense of inner peace.

I enter the office and walk straight to my desk. No one comments on my suffocating scent.

10.30am I go to make a coffee and notice my closest desk neighbour is now working from a table in the office kitchen area.

12.00pm A busy morning means I haven’t had the opportunity to circulate in the office as much as I planned. The scent has now settled to a level that could almost be described as “not that bad”, so I sneak back to the toilets for a quick reapplication. Compulsively sniffing my wrists, I can detect traces of vanilla, which I confirm is one of the official base notes. The complete list of ingredients, for the scent hounds, is as follows:

Top Notes: Crushed Pepper, Citrus Zest, Blue Sage
Mid Notes: Wild Oakmoss, French Lavender, Clearwood®
Base Notes: Tonka Bean, Cedarwood Atlas, Charred Vanilla

1.00pm I google “DC10 review” to see if anyone has beaten me to the scoop. There are reviews for a guitar pedal, a hi-fi speaker, an Ibiza nightclub with an alleged “pickpocket problem” and a well-known make of aircraft all with the same name, but none for Dan Carter’s new eau de toilette. It is yet to get a page on fragrantica.com, “Your Online Destination For All Things Fragrance”.

2.00pm According to the Chemist Warehouse website, DC10 Sport is an “empowering and strong fragrance resplendent of [sic] Dan’s breathtaking sporting career”. The same spiel also claims that “Dan’s debut scent was inspired by motion and constant movement and progression” and that “the striking bottle and packaging were designed to hardness [sic] this sense of movement through blurred outer edges while drawing focus to the admirable path forged by Dan Carter that we all could look to as inspiration as we continue in our own lives”.

Reading between the lines, what I think this means is that Dan Carter is having an identity crisis. For years his identity was as clearly defined as his six-pack: All Black, Crusader, Jockey model. But since retiring from professional rugby in 2020, he’s found himself set adrift, something many professional athletes experience after they retire. Unlike his former teammates, however, he’s too famous to simply assimilate into the workforce as a real estate agent. Instead, he now leads the busy yet directionless life of a celebrity. 

Celebrities don’t have jobs, they take on projects. Dan Carter has already published two autobiographies and a confusing high-concept coffee table book. He has a charity, the DC10 Fund in partnership with Unicef. He’s dabbled in NFTs. He’s a Chemist Warehouse ambassador, a freelance kicking consultant, goes to fashion shows sometimes. He has a million followers on Instagram. And now he has his own fragrance, which I am wearing, and which still no one has commented on.

3.00pm Is it socially acceptable to comment on a colleague’s scent? On this kind of topic I tend to defer to the wisdom of Portuguese football mastermind Jose Mourinho: “I prefer not to speak.” I have been counting on my officemates to have the opposite philosophy, but maybe I need a to take different approach. First, I return to the toilet and reapply a generous third coat of DC10 Sport.

4.00pm Desperate times call for desperate measures. I make an anonymous survey and posted a link to it in Slack, asking everybody who is or has been in the office to fill it out.

4.30pm Sixteen people respond. 69% say they didn’t notice a new scent in the office. “Wish I did,” one of them writes. Of the five who did notice it, one reports thinking “it smells like teen boy deodorant”. Another says it reminds them “of being on the bus in year 10 … is it Lynx?” 

I go and talk to another colleague who works in an adjacent office and doesn’t have access to the Google Form. Thoughts? “It kind of smells like–” he hesitates for a moment, and I can tell he’s trying to think of any other way to describe it – “Lynx.” That’s what I thought too, I say. He thinks about it some more. “It’s the scent of the generic New Zealand dude.”

5.30pm This isn’t the story I wanted to write. I hoped people would say nice things about Dan Carter’s signature scent (and in fairness, one respondent to the anonymous fragrance survey did write “it smells good (I think)”), allowing me to shock them to their core when I revealed what it was.

But is smelling like Lynx such a bad thing? I ponder this question as I leave my bottle of DC10 Sport on my desk, bringing my work day and this ill-conceived experiment to an end. Lynx is the defining men’s deodorant of my generation’s youth, and we associate it with a part of our lives most of us would rather leave behind. We like to think we have moved on, that the deodorants we now buy at the supermarket are somehow more grown-up and sophisticated.

But what if our adolescent instincts were right all along, and it actually just smells good? Maybe it’s time for a critical reassessment of Lynx. That’s what I’ll be doing over the coming weeks and months, anyway, as I work my way through this 100ml bottle of DC10 Sport.

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Madeleine Chapman
— Editor
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