The rugby shirt is the Breton top of 2024. I am entirely serious. Instead of Pablo Picasso or Brigitte Bardot in a navy and white stripe T-shirt, your style icon for this spring is Prince William in his St Andrews uni days, popping the contrast white collar on his Abercrombie & Fitch.
This is not quite true. I’m exaggerating for effect, no need to panic. Forget freshers’ week. Put Twickenham out of your mind. Instead, think David Hockney, in a pink and blue rugby shirt with washed-out green trousers. Think Diana, Princess of Wales. Chloë Sevigny, Oscar-nominated actor who – more importantly for our purposes, is one of the best dressed women in the world, with an innate style compass that unfailingly finds true north – regularly wears a rugby shirt, these days. “It’s warm and it’s easy and it’s casual. It’s basically a nicer version of a sweatshirt. I mean, it has a collar!” she told Harper’s Bazaar last year.
The rugby shirt is having a fashion moment, as a weekend staple, fitting neatly into the slot in your wardrobe that the Breton once owned. Sevigny, naturally, nails the appeal: the Breton was the perfect weekend top half when we wore our clothes a little closer fitting. The rugby shirt is ideal for a time in fashion when we gravitate to sportswear, to the slightly oversized, to the straightforward appeal of a white shirt collar.
If an outfit works with a Breton top, it will work with a rugby shirt, too
The rugby shirt’s new wave is coming from street style in New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen. Now, as far as I know, they don’t play a whole lot of rugby in the US or in Denmark, which is how the rugby shirt has escaped the thorny class issues and associations of blokeishness this time around, and reinvented itself as a chic, easy garment that you might pull on of a Saturday morning, that is casual enough for errands but has sufficient contemporary fashion currency to do you proud for an evening in the pub.