Explaining shirt design through historyfrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

This button is rubber. This collar was cut in half. These stripes aren't style. Nothing on this shirt is fashion. It was built for a game of violence. This is episode 76 of Chasing Best, and today we're looking at the design of the rugby shirt. The sport that would need this shirt started at a school, rugby school in Warwickshire, England. One of the oldest and most exclusive boarding schools in the country. The boys there had been playing a loosely organized kicking game for centuries. Then, according to legend, in 1823, a student named William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran. Whether that actually happened is debated. What's not debated is that by the eighteen forties, the boys at rugby school were playing a version of football where you could grab the ball and grab each other. And that changed everything about what they wore. Early rugby shirts borrowed their collars from dress shirts. Tall, soft, and easy to fold down. The problem was the tackle. A tall collar is the easiest thing on a shirt to grab. One hand on it and you can wrench a man down by the neck. So rugby collars got cut short. Low enough that there's less real estate to seize. Stiff enough that it doesn't fold over and offer a grip. Now good at the buttons. On most shirts, buttons are plastic, horn or metal. On a rugby shirt, they're rubber. The reason is brutal. In this sport, a player's face regularly slams into another player's chest. A hard button in that zone is a weapon. It splits skin open and chips teeth. Rubber compresses on impact. But even rubber wasn't enough. Look at how the buttons sit. They're not exposed. They're hidden behind a fabric flap called a placket. In a scrum, eight men pack chest to to chest any raised surface, even soft, becomes a pressure point. So the shirt buries the rubber buttons. And the whole front of the chest becomes a smooth, unbroken surface. Then there's the weight of the fabric itself. Pick up a rugby shirt and compare it to a simple tee. It's noticeably heavier. That's because rugby is one of the only sports where grabbing your opponent's clothing is legal. Defenders seized the ball carrier shirt to haul them down. A lightweight jersey would rip in one pull. So the cotton was knit dense and heavy to survive being pulled hundreds of tier per match. And then the stripes. Before numbered jerseys, before television, matches were played on muddy fields in front of crowds who couldn't tell one mud soaked player from another. Broad, horizontal stripes solved this. They stayed visible at a distance even when half the shirt was caked in dirt. Each club picked its own combination. So the next time you see one hanging in a shop window, look at it closely. The rubber buttons, the short collar, and the heavy knit. Every detail on that shirt was engineered to survive a game that tore bodies apart.