Even Cam Newton can appreciate memes about his fashion style

LOS ANGELES—Go ahead, laugh about Cam Newton’s sometimes outrageous outfits. The NFL star can laugh about it, and even enjoys some of the online memes have made him the butt of their jokes.

“Some of them are funny. But it is what it is. You’ve got to be lighthearted about it. You can’t take it personal,” the Carolina Panthers quarterback said in a recent interview. “You to have to deal with certain things. And a meme is one of them. Fortunately and unfortunately. Look at Michael Jordan. He has one of the most popular memes of them all – but I don’t think he’s crying in the corner somewhere.”

The 27-year-old Carolina Panthers star spoke on the set of a Buick commercial set to air during the first quarter of the Super Bowl. He was filming alongside a pee-wee football team in Los Angeles outside a museum with supermodel Miranda Kerr.

Newton’s extravagant outfits at post-game press conferences drew plenty of notice from social media, with memes going viral. Newton said he’d been most impressed two memes in particular last season.

“There was one of them with the parent-teacher conference – ‘This is how your mom enters the PTA meeting.’ Also like a Batman connotation – when it was like ‘Batman has until 9 o’clock to show his face or a person is going to die,’ with the pink one. It’s cool,” he said.

Newton said he developed his unique sense of fashion in church, through the junior ROTC program, and from the way he was disciplined as a youngster in Atlanta.

“I grew up in the church and I’ve always had the fashion eye, so to speak, to know how to wear your clothes, have a belt, socks, no socks, whatever. Ironing your clothes is important,” he said. “And I have to credit JROTC for being able to – how to tie ties. But as far as me, I had a lot of energy growing up, so for my punishment, it was to not have the luxury of wearing dress-down clothes, so to speak – like sweat pants, jeans, or whatnot. I started having to be disciplined by just wearing church clothes. And it started out as something that I was ashamed about. And then I just got used to it and embraced it.”