If you haven’t been to a country club in the past 20 years, know that style-wise, you haven’t missed much. Giant polo shirts, pleated pants, and goofy-looking shoes still abound on your average 15 handicapper. If there’s a distinction to be made, it’s that now the fabrics involved much more resemble items you’d wear in the gym versus on a yacht. In other words: Golf style is, for the most part, still...not great. But thanks to a new crop of athletes, young casual golfers, and independent brands embracing the game, an otherwise staid genre is experiencing an injection of fashion energy it’s never seen before.
Start on the course, with the fact that there are now brands that make legitimately good-looking clothing that is dedicated to golf apparel. The most notable is Malbon Golf, a California-based company founded in 2017 by Stephen and Erica Malbon. If typical golf wear exists basically as logoed-to-death merch for promoting equipment, then Malbon Golf benefits from the fact that it just makes cool clothes...that happen to be for golf. The collection features a core of country-club-appropriate gear, including polo shirts, trousers, caps, and quarter-zip pullovers. But where Malbon talks the young-buck talk—calling product releases “drops,” making logo hoodies, and getting No Vacancy Inn’s Brock Korsan to model in its lookbook—it also walks the walk, most notably in its restrained design.
The brand's cursive logo is minimal enough to stay out of the way of things like its elastic-waist, belt-loop-adorned pants, or its range of polo shirts in minimal colors like navy blue, burgundy, and black. But there’s also a hat tip to streetwear (and Caddyshack-era Bill Murray) in the form of bold camo bucket hats. In an age when plenty of dads still think they can wear their golf gear out to dinner, Malbon is making products that actually can pull double duty and never look out of place.
If Malbon is the brand making golf gear that you can also wear elsewhere, then Whim Golf, founded just earlier this year by Chicago natives Colin Heaberg and Will Gisel, is the one making great clothes that you can also wear golfing. The brand’s tagline—“For people who might like golf”—leaves the 18th green and plants its flag squarely in the real, non-country-club world. Golf is more inspiration than goal here: A collared crewneck sweatshirt, for example, is a clever way to backhandedly meet dress codes on chillier golf outings. The technical pants could work during rainy rounds, but in practice seem a better fit with a pair of Common Projects on the weekend. Its lone polo shirt is made in the U.S., logo-less, oversize, and done up in a black-and-navy combo, making it the kind of shirt you’d expect to see hanging on the racks at Totokaelo, not on the back of a dude holding a new Titleist driver. The only place golf is explicitly referenced is on the label’s graphic tees—items that, ironically, cannot be worn on most courses. The shirts themselves feel like a new idea. We know that people have long worn tees with references to basketball, football, and soccer. As streetwear has gone global, it’s only fair to assume that some of the kids who play golf are also kids who buy Supreme. Don’t they need something to wear?
But for the most part, what average golfers wear still mostly depends on what the pros are sporting on any given Sunday. In the days of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, golf style wasn’t much different from what men, golfers or not, were wearing on the weekends. As a result, most guys looked great in their cardigans, slim polos, chinos, and saddle shoes. In Tiger Woods’s prime, he was so dominant, so much cooler than anyone else, and in such great physical shape that he made things like mock-neck red shirts show up on dudes at your local municipal track. Even in 2019, Nike is using Tiger’s status as the most influential man in the game to sell gear, most recently as a way to break into less tech-y golf apparel. We see this in the case of its “Frank” polos and dad hats, which are 100% cotton and feature Tiger’s iconic head cover/mascot embroidered onto the items. Each time Tiger has worn these products during pre-tournament press conferences (he’s yet to sport them during competition), they’ve sold out immediately. The polo might still be too golf-y for most people to wear regularly, but a twill dad hat with a cool logo is universal.
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