It goes without saying that rugby shirts aren’t just for rugby. These hard-wearing everyday popover shirts might have been designed for chasing balls around muddy pitches, but as luck would have it they also work wonders for climbing, hiking, painting and pretty much everything else. Strong, smart ‘n’ stripey—they’re a true lo-fi sportswear classic. This is the story behind ‘em…
As you’d expect, things kicked off on the rugby pitch. While the exact origins of how the sport first began is a much-contested subject, it’s generally accepted that the oft-told tale of a schoolboy named William Webb Ellis inadvertently creating rugby by catching a football mid-match match and running it to the goal is pure fiction.
In the early 19th century ‘football’ was still a very loose term—with different towns playing the game in wildly different ways. Pupils at Rugby School were some of the first to jot their rules down, but in 1863 when the Football Association came together to formalise the game, it was decided that carrying the ball and the dubious art of hacking were both out of the picture. The teams that played this way left the FA in protest and rugby branched off to become its own sport.
Back then the game was played in thick wool jerseys, white trousers and the occasional monocle. Dignified? Yep. Practical? Not particularly. Snooty garb might have been alright for the golf course or the croquet lawn, but the hands-on, no-holds-barred nature of rugby meant that function was paramount.
Stuffy wool was soon swapped for heavyweight woven cotton, rubber buttons were added to the collar for safety in the scrum, and… well that’s pretty much it. A masterpiece of sporting simplicity, the unknown designers who set the template for the rugby shirt back in the early 20th century hit upon a remarkably straight-forward, no-nonsense recipe that’s never really needed much tweaking. And while real-deal egg-chasers switched to polyester a few decades ago, the rugby shirt as we know it off-pitch has remained remarkably similar for over 100 years.
This is where things get interesting. In the same way a pair of G-Shorts worked for more than just rock climbing, the function-first details of the rugby shirt elevated it far beyond the waterlogged playing fields of Great Britain.
For starters, the rugby shirt was one of the closest things to ‘casual wear’ that a boarding school pupil would have stashed in their wardrobes—so they’d often be repurposed for weekend hiking trips or bike rides into town. This upper-class flavour meant that for those in the USA the rugby shirt was a symbol of the old money elite, which is why they became part of the Ivy League uniform alongside other British exports like the waxed hunting jacket and the Shetland jumper.
On a more practical level, outdoor outfitter LL Bean sold them as do-it-all camp-site essentials, while mail-order sailing brand Lands’ End repositioned these scrum-proof jerseys as the ideal shirt for an afternoon tying knots on a catamaran. David Hockney wore his for painting and Werner Herzog wore his for pushing a steamboat up a hill.
And then there’s the link with rock climbing. The story goes that back in 1970 pre-Patagonia Yvon Chouinard was struggling with the winter chill during a trip to Scotland when he came across a stash of rugby shirts in a local shop. He saw the potential straight away—not only were these humble cotton pullovers warm, but the sturdy collars gave added protection against rope-rash and sunburn.
This was an era of heather grey sportswear and olive-drab surplus gear, so when Chouinard got back to California the bold stripes of his new shirt instantly caught the attention of the style-conscious climbers of Yosemite. Realising he was onto something, he started to import the shirts from across the Atlantic, stitched a newly-designed mountain-range logo to the collar and the rest is outdoor industry history. The script had been flipped, and the rugby shirt had transformed from prep-school mainstay to a dirtbag outdoor favourite.
A few decades later, the Lo Life crew of New York gave the rugby shirt another lease of life. At a time when Ralph Lauren was marketing his vision of the American dream squarely at the minted elite, this gang of working-class inner-city kids recontextualised his POLO brand for the streets of Brooklyn.
Ditching ‘quiet luxury’ for the brazen and braggadocious, they carried out wild heists on unwitting department stores to nab the most intense POLO gear on the shelves. Rugby shirts were heavily in the mix, worn alongside technicolour sailing jackets and ornate patterned ski jumpers in a bid to outdress other crew members during heated meets at Crown Heights’ Empire Roller Disco.
Such is the power of the humble rugby shirt. From British playing fields to Brooklyn roller rinks via Yosemite cliff faces and David Hockney’s studio, they’ve got a Forrest Gump-esque habit of subtly showing up right in the midst of key subcultural moments. And long may this continue.
The Langdon Rugby Shirt is Gramicci’s take on this classic design. Combining reassuringly hefty dry-touch jersey cotton with underarm gussets for unrivalled reach, it’s built for the rough and tumble of modern life—whether you’re chucking a ball around in the park or dangling halfway up your local climbing wall.
