The Grand Puba Moment: The 1993 TV Performance Behind the AP92 Jersey
by Matthew Dehaty
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In 1993, Grand Puba of Brand Nubian appeared on Yo! MTV Raps alongside Mary J. Blige to perform "What's the 411?". He came out in a white Fila visor, a pair of Nike Revaderchis, and a colour-blocked Polo Ralph Lauren Alpine rugby shirt, tucked into a pair of Girbaud denim shorts. People who know a lot more about hip-hop history than I do still bring this outfit up. Somewhere in the middle of the performance, he changed one of his own lyrics on the spot, swapping a shoutout to a rival brand for one to Polo instead. I didn't discover any of this until long after I'd already fallen for rugby shirts through a much more conventional route, playing the game itself. But once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. That's the moment our AP92 jersey is built from.
Why Puba, and Why Polo
By the early 1990s, Ralph Lauren had already become one of the defining brands on the streets of New York, adopted and reinterpreted by a scene the label was never really designed for. A crew known as the Lo-Lifes had spent years turning Polo's sportswear into something closer to a uniform, and by the time Grand Puba started wearing it on television, the brand was already deep enough into hip-hop that entire tracks were being written about it. Puba didn't start that relationship. I'm not going to pretend he did, or that I'm any kind of authority on it. But the Alpine rugby moment is one of the clearest, most specific examples of it, a single outfit on a single broadcast that people are still writing about more than thirty years later, which is more than most of us can say for anything we wore in 1993, or, in my case, whatever I was wearing as a ten-year-old, which almost certainly wasn't Polo.
The Sample Underneath the Sample
"What's the 411?" was built on a sample of an early-eighties Debra Laws track called "Very Special", one sound lifted from a different era and turned into something new. There's something in that I liked enough to steal the idea. The AP92 jersey works the same way. We haven't reproduced the original shirt, partly out of respect and partly because we'd almost certainly get the details wrong. We've taken the colour blocking, the idea of it, and built it in Old Novo's own colours, the same way a producer takes a loop and makes it theirs rather than just replaying the original record.
The Sequel, Two Years Later
The Polo Alpine moment wasn't the end of the story either. On 19 March 1994, Snoop Doggy Dogg performed on Saturday Night Live in a red, white and blue striped rugby shirt with TOMMY across the chest, a shirt that only made it onto his back because Tommy Hilfiger's brother drove through the rain the night before to pull it off a showroom mannequin. By the next morning it had sold out everywhere. Two years after Puba put Polo on record, Tommy Hilfiger got its own moment on the biggest stage in American television, on a rapper from Long Beach. That's the jersey behind our TH94, the second piece in the same colour-blocked series, built in our own crimson, cream and black rather than a straight copy.
Why It Still Matters, at Least to Me
Neither of these moments happened on a rugby pitch, which is really the point. The rugby shirt has always slipped in and out of places it was never designed for: climbing gear, streetwear, prime-time television, without ever losing the collar, the stripes, or the weight of it. We've written before about how the coolest rugby jerseys don't have to be worn on the field, and this is about as good an example as I've found. A rugby shirt, tucked into denim shorts, on a hip-hop show in 1993, somehow ending up as part of the reason a small team in the North East of England is making jerseys thirty years later. I still find that a bit funny, if I'm honest.