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
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved 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 what hangs in their closets.
We lean 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 narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category 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.
