Bad taste, beautiful or "ugly-cool?" The latest jersey of the Stade de Francais rugby club, home to Ewen McKenzie and Mark Gasnier, has caused quite a commotion.
Their jersey designers have turned out the face of Parisienne 13th-century heroine Blanche de Castille, the wife of Louis VIII, in an Andy Warhol-type print. Original? Yes. Weird? Yes. The worst sports uniform ever? Maybe.
It must be noted that the Stade Francais designers are repeat offenders. Remember their tie-dyed hot pink, mint green and blue get-up? Remember the jersey with the pink hibiscuses decorating the torso? But others have committed sartorial disasters, too. Hello, Milan Blagojevic, who forgot to leave his mullet in the 1980s and was the perfect footballer to model the 1992 Socceroos jersey. Blagojevic wore that disaster with flair. All those green and golds flamboyantly mashed together, combined with his mullet fluttering in the wind.
Which brings us to another footballer, Mexico goalkeeper Jorge Campos. Men's Vogue recently claimed Campos had "migraine-inducing flair". Campos didn't make zig-zags cool, but he sure wore them spectacularly at the 1994 World Cup.
Back closer to home, the Brisbane Broncos' Super League gear was possibly the worst uniform during that awful sporting war. Greedy and badly dressed.
And the AFL cannot escape censure. The 1995 Hawthorn "harlequin" jumper, in particular, was awful. Even Peter Schwab, then marketing manager for the Hawks, admitted it didn't look that great. "The response from supporters has been more towards the negative," he said at the time.
"Could you understand that?"
"Yes". Understandably, the jumper was soon dumped.
In the US, the worst offenders were the Houston Astros from 1975-'86. The baseball team's outfit had bands of orange and yellow around the torso and stripes of the same colour down the legs. The numbers on their white pants were near the crotch. However, Jim Deshaies, an Astros pitcher of the time, still has a soft spot for the look. "They were ugly," Deshaies said. "But they were ugly-cool."