A Scrum of Stripes Refined for the Street

By DAVID COLMAN

FLIP through the pages of Rugby World magazine, and you will see why rugby players have the reputation they do. Action shots of refrigerator-size blokes mauling one another - striped, muddy and bloody - abound. So do novelty T-shirts with droll takes on the sport's unbridled aggression, like "Rugby: Elegant Violence" and "Give Blood, Play Rugby."

It is, after all, a sport summed up in a famous quip contrasting it with soccer, a k a football: Football is a sport for gentlemen played by hooligans; rugby is a sport for hooligans played by gentlemen.

But a more relevant observation about the game is that there are two kinds of players: those who look like piano movers and those who look like piano players. Lately the piano movers - the props, hookers and flankers - have been losing ground in visibility to the fly halves, wings and centers, their leaner, more photogenic teammates. And with popular interest in the game on the upswing, its familiar oversize striped jersey has been slimmed down and sexed up. Fashion houses like Burberry and Dsquared and popular youth brands like American Eagle and Champion report that the once schlumpy rugby shirt is now a lean, mean best seller.

"This is sexy rugby," said Robert Burke, the fashion director for Bergdorf Goodman, which is doing a brisk business in jerseys with four-inch-wide stripes (or "hoops" in rugby parlance) in fine-gauge cotton knit. Bergdorf purposely made the shirts more fitted and tapered. The smaller sizes sell best, suggesting that fit and fashionable customers are the buyers. "These are not the XXL guys," Mr. Burke said. "You don't want to see that coming at you in a stripe, whether he can play rugby or not."

In Europe sex is not just selling the clothes, it is selling the sport. Rugby stars, once pale, defiant brutes, are increasingly sex symbols flaunting tanned good looks and six-pack abs to recruit fans to the game. In England the boyish fly half Jonny Wilkinson became a hero on par with the soccer star David Beckham when he scored a drop goal in the last 30 seconds of the 2003 World Cup Final to win it for England. The Welsh player Gavin Henson has posed bare-chested for magazines, telling The Guardian in March, "My goal in my rugby career is to try to get rugby bigger than soccer - and, if that means being really fruity, so be it."

Last year in France - ah, France - a steamy calendar of naked rugby players, "Dieux du Stade," became a sensation, selling more than 100,000 copies and prompting a 2005 sequel shot by Carter Smith that has sold 250,000. (The portfolio will be published in this country in August in book form, as "Locker Room Nudes.")

Even so, in the United States, where the terms "scrum," "ruck" and "maul" elicit little more than puzzlement, Ralph Lauren has a better chance at rugby stardom. In Boston last fall Mr. Lauren (whose English sheepdog was named Rugby) opened the first of his Rugby shops, offering sports clothes with a more athletic fit and a lower price. Fittingly, the familiar polo pony logo is replaced by a rugby kicker.

As Mr. Lauren has long known, the rugby shirt is practical on several levels. Lightweight, tailored styles can be worn under a sport coat with khakis or jeans; their sporty British heritage gives them a dressier flair, like a colorful cross between a dress shirt and a polo. And the long sleeves, while not ideal for an August day, look cooler on a summer night than a short-sleeve polo.

While fashion houses looking to tap into the rugby moment usually offer shirts with hoops in two-, four-, or six-inch bands, outfitters like Rugby Imports in East Providence, R.I., have stylish variations, including solid colors or solids with one broad, contrasting hoop across the chest.

Christopher Stahl, who teaches cultural studies at New York University and plays with the New York team the Gotham Knights, adds that unlike a football jersey, a rugby jersey worn in the street implies you are a player, not just a fan. The game's long history, stretching back to 1823 and the Rugby School in England, where the sport was born (supposedly when a student picked up the soccer ball and ran with it), adds a kind of class-conscious one-upmanship to the more familiar trappings of machismo. "It says I can be tough without being part of a predetermined narrative about American manhood," Mr. Stahl said.

BUT make no mistake: playing rugby is as rough as it gets. Mr. Stahl said he is amused to see trim young guys, some his own students, wearing "authentic" team jerseys with low numbers on the back. In rugby, numbers correspond to positions, not players, and the Nos. 1 to 8 are the province of the piano movers.

For the record, piano players are Nos. 9 to 15. A No. 6 checking in at 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds would quickly find himself, as they say on the field, at the bottom of a ruck, with, among other things, a serious laundry problem.