It starts as a perfectly normal fashion week hello.
Shawn Mendes and Romeo Beckham, both dressed head to toe in black, lean in for a hug at Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in Milan. The hug lasts a beat longer than your average air kiss, but nothing about it would make you look twice. Then, in the last few seconds of the clip, they pull apart and Romeo sends Shawn a wink.
That’s all it took. The 11-second video, posted to X by pop culture account BuzzingPop the morning after the show, has passed 4.3 million views, and the replies have been going ever since.
We’ll get to the clip, and to what the internet did with it. But the wink lands a lot harder once you know where it happened, and who these two are.
Inside a Gucci Store That Wasn’t a Store
The hug happened on Friday, September 25, at Gucci’s spring/summer 2027 show – a collection called The Store Show. Creative director Demna, the Georgian designer who took over the house after a decade at Balenciaga, turned the runway into a full-scale Gucci boutique, complete with jewelry cabinets, clothing racks, shoe displays and mirrors. According to The Guardian, there were even sales assistants on hand who couldn’t actually sell anything.
Models strolled in as if they’d wandered off the street, stopping to check themselves out in the full-length mirrors. Demna described the collection as the first to present his complete personal vision for Gucci, and it leaned hard into ’80s excess: broad shoulders, pencil skirts, chunky triple belts and fur coats big enough to live in. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Candice Swanepoel walked the show.
The front row was stacked. The PA news agency reported that Nicki Minaj arrived in a white fur coat, tennis star Jannik Sinner sat beside Anna Wintour, and both Romeo and Shawn had front-row seats.
It isn’t even their first Gucci front row together. Both were there for Demna’s February show too, so this wasn’t two strangers bumping into each other by the belt display.
Shawn Has Heard It All Before
Shawn isn’t just a guest at these things. He’s a Gucci ambassador, and he was one of the faces of Demna’s first ad campaign for the house, alongside Tom Brady and Alex Consani. Demna told WWD he wanted the campaign to be “about emotional awakening and choosing to feel love again.” Put a pin in that.
If anyone is used to the internet reading into his every move, it’s Shawn.
Back in 2016, a 17-year-old Shawn told fans on Snapchat: “First of all, I’m not gay. Second of all, it shouldn’t make a difference if I was or if I wasn’t.” Eight years later, in October 2024, he took a different approach on stage at Red Rocks in Colorado, before debuting a song about the rumors.
“The real truth about my life and about my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone and I don’t really know sometimes, and I know other times,” he said, as reported by Variety. We covered that song and the moment behind it at the time.
Since then, the internet has shipped him with pretty much everyone, including an entirely AI-generated romance with Robert Irwin. In real life, he’s reportedly with Brazilian actress Bruna Marquezine. The couple went Instagram official in August, and she sat right next to him at the Gucci show.
So no, nobody is announcing anything. But the fans can dream, and Romeo just gave them plenty of material.
Romeo’s Very Queer Autumn
Romeo, the 24-year-old second son of David and Victoria Beckham, has been modeling since he fronted Burberry’s children’s line at 10. Last year he walked the runway for Versace at Milan Fashion Week, so this city is familiar territory.
He also tried to follow his dad into football. He spent a year in Arsenal’s academy as a kid, then swapped it for tennis, before later returning to the pitch with Brentford’s B team.
That tennis detail turns out to matter, because Romeo is about to make his acting debut in Forty Love, a French queer tennis romance directed by fashion photographer Pierre-Ange Carlotti.
He plays a charismatic rival who shows up and upends the life of Sacha, a young player chasing his first major title, played by Paul Kircher. PinkNews reports that an earlier first-look image showed Romeo’s character gazing longingly at Sacha. The film opens in French cinemas on November 25.
The casting has drawn its share of “nepo baby” comments online. But if anyone was wondering whether Romeo can hold a look for a camera, he just sent in his audition tape.
The Hug, the Wink and 4.3 Million Views
Here’s the clip. It starts with the two of them posing side by side for the camera. Then comes the handshake, the hug, and a few seconds of chat. Keep your eyes on Romeo right at the end.
The Comments Section Had Notes
The top (pun intended) reaction came in a quote post that has racked up almost 65,000 likes: “Baby Beckham isn’t playing, he needs that.”
Plenty of people landed on the same two words. “oh romeo..” sighed one fan, in a post with more than 5,000 likes. “Yes that wink said a lot,” wrote another. “I just know they went home together,” added a third.
One viewer had a technical note: “Romeo wrong eye!!! WRONG EYE ROMEO!” Someone else skipped straight past the speculation and asked, “What’s the ao3 tag?” – AO3 being the fan fiction archive where ships like this one tend to end up.
Of course, there were a lot of topping discussions, though it seems the commenters couldn’t decide who was going to do what.
A few people did push back. One user pointed out that this was “the most friendly interaction between two people with girlfriends,” and accused gay men on the app of turning it into fan fiction.
Which, to be fair, is exactly what we’re doing here.
The Store Show’s sales assistants weren’t allowed to sell a thing. Romeo sold that wink anyway.