By Danny Coyle
My mum once bought me a multicoloured rugby 'fashion' shirt from some swanky shop. This wasn't recently, it was when I was still of an age where my mother would buy most of my wardrobe.
I refused to wear it. Even at a young age, I had some sense of whether or not I would look like a plonker in something I was being encouraged to put on. She took it back to the shop.
My fashion judgement may have gone slightly awry at times during my teens but upon such sartorial aberrations is character built – especially when you go to an all-boys school.
In Paris, however, the power to say no seems to have deserted the players of Stade Francais.
At first, pink was 'fun', it was a departure that somehow seemed to fit with the glitziest rugby club around, a club whose flamboyant owner was able to attract 80,000 to some of his team's league matches and who is famed for his lavish end-of-season bashes. Then pink morphed into flowery patterns, then to some sort of tie-dyed look.
It was all beginning to get a bit ridiculous.
And now we have the Warhol look. Yes. Stade's wonderfully talented players will be marauding across the fields of Europe this season in a shirt splashed with pop-art style prints of a 13th century Parisian heroine's visage.
One wonders what their new Australian coach Ewen McKenzie really thinks, having come from the New South Wales Waratahs in Sydney, where to the locals Blanche de Castille sounds like something you'd order in an upmarket Darling Harbour restaurant to go with your main meal.
Warhol once said: "An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them."
Those responsible for Stade's latest ensemble, take note.
Wonderful kit. And be happy: they're preparing a new one for next year, my conservative English friends.
Posted by: Nicolas | 10 October 2008 at 11:24 AM