We’ve been celebrating the mall brand renaissance all year, and Abercrombie & Fitch’s take on the Rugby only fans that flame. Here, the brand has eschewed some of its current trend-following design cues and wisely gone for a classic silhouette more akin to the outdoors gear it made decades ago. The result is soft, fits well, and is an affordable way to dip your toes into the world of rugby shirts without too much commitment.
Best Rugby Shirt for Brisk Fall Days: L.L.Bean Wicked Soft Cotton-Cashmere Rugby Sweater
Colors: 3 | Sizes: S-3XL | Fabric: 95% cotton, 5% cashmere
Sometimes, you need to take a rugby shirt off the pitch and into your day-to-day life. For these instances, L.L. Bean’s Wicked Soft Cotton-Cashmere Rugby Sweater has your back. Equal parts sweater polo and rugby shirt, it pairs ultra-soft cashmere with rugged looks that will kill on date night or at the Sunday flea. And somehow, it still holds up to the elements: This cashmere is machine-washable, so you don’t need to baby it if you do end up taking part in your local scrum.
Best Rugby Shirt for Fashion Guys: Wales Bonner Organic Cotton-Jersey Polo Shirt
Colors: 1 | Sizes: S-XXL | Fabric: 100% cotton
If anyone can turn prep on its head, it’s Grace Wales Bonner. Her embroidered logo, shoulder-paneled rugby shirt brings a touch of class that only designers like her can summon from such a simple silhouette (just look at her upgraded take on the Adidas Samba.) The cotton is also 100% organic, and those thin red stripes are incredibly satisfying given that most rugby shirts come in blockier stripes, if not a single block color.
Best Rugby Shirt for Preppy Goths: J.Crew Striped Placket Rugby Shirt
Colors: 3 | Sizes: XS-XXL | Fabric: 100% cotton
Available in just white, black, or a foresty green, this banger from another mall brand, J.Crew, pairs solid, quiet colors with subtly striped plackets and a pleasing, tiny stitched badge on the wrist. The soft, well-fitting cut can easily be dressed up or down, a phrase you’ve heard a lot, but is actually important this time: One of the best things about the modern J.Crew is that you really can wear it whenever, wherever, and however you want. We more than suspect that ethos comes from Creative Director (and Noah founder) Brendon Babenzien and his eclectic, prep-infused street style.
Best Rugby Shirt for the Scrum: Barbarian Traditional Collegiate Stripe Rugby Jersey
Colors: 4 | Sizes: XS-3XL | Fabric: 100% cotton
If you’re looking for an authentic rugby shirt still worn by players the world over, Barbarian is the way to go. The company’s knockabout gear has been tested on pitches worldwide for four decades and counting, and these rugby shirts are made in Canada out of premium 12 oz. cotton and feature all the details you’d expect from a shirt designed to follow you into battle—which means it’ll hold up just fine accompanying you to the farmer’s market too. Plus, for the real heads, you just can’t beat that little logo patch on the cuff.
More Rugby Shirts We Love
RRL Oversize Striped Jersey Rugby Shirt
Societá Rugby Shirt
Drake’s Wide Stripe Mock Collar Long-Sleeve Jersey
Ayr Go Team Rugby Shirt
Noah Classic Rugby Shirt
Todd Snyder x Champion Oversized Terry Rugby Shirt
Battenwear Rugby Shirt
If our years of experience have taught us anything, it’s that “best” is highly subjective. The GQ office is just as varied in body type, stylistic preference, and budget as the rest of the world, and if you polled our colleagues, you’d be hard-pressed to land on a single pick that everyone agrees on. So with that in mind, we made every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the superlative picks across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
These days, you can find a rugby shirt for as little as $100 or as much as $1,000. Be wary of sky-high prices, though: expensive doesn’t always mean better, and affordable doesn’t always mean bad. During our testing, there were $50 options that surprised us and $500 options that disappointed us—but for the most part, the best of the bunch landed squarely between those two extremes.
To kick off the process, we enlisted a who’s who of GQ staffers to wear-test our contenders. Some of them have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about the precious real estate in their closets.
We leaned on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrowed down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price. (Like we said—different strokes for different folks.)
Our testers owned plenty of the picks on this list already, but a handful were totally new to us. So after several months of intense wear, we recorded our deeply scientific observations and rejiggered our selections accordingly. Based on those evaluations, we ran the numbers, collated the anecdotal evidence, and emerged with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best rugby shirts for men right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)
How to Style a Rugby Shirt
Rugby shirts are Swiss-army-knife versatile: you can wear one on its own with jeans or chinos, or sub it into just about any situation you’d typically wear a V-neck sweater with (over a tee or under a blazer) to give your look a little extra laid-back ruggedness. In the right setting, the rugby shirt gives off some serious back-roads, rope-towing, van-driving dirtbag energy, too: It wasn’t that long ago that pioneering outdoor apparel designers like Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard were rocking cotton rugby shirts as they climbed El Capitan.
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