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FIT OF THE WEEK · THE OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP · JULY 2026
Open Championship style is the only golf fashion that is genuinely about function, and it is better for it. There is no colour-coordinated Sunday scripting to admire here, no debut of a spring line under a Georgia sun. There is weather — horizontal, Irish-Sea weather — and the clothes that survive it, and out of that constraint the Open produces the most quietly stylish week of the golf calendar. This is our field guide to dressing for Royal Birkdale, where the flex is not the logo but the seams.
The Waterproof Is the Statement Piece
At every other major the rain suit is an apology — the thing a player pulls on grudgingly, over the real outfit, when the round is already spoiled. At the Open it is the outfit. A properly cut shell in a deep bottle green or a chalky stone, worn with the collar up against a crosswind, is the single most convincing look in professional golf, and it works precisely because it is not trying to. Galvin Green has owned this category for years for good reason; Sunderland of Scotland, less fashionable and more devout, makes the shell your caddie actually trusts. The tell of a serious links dresser is that the waterproof looks lived-in rather than deployed.
Knitwear, and the Case for the Quarter-Zip
The lambswool sweater is to the Open what the short-sleeve polo is to Augusta: the default, the uniform, the thing that looks right in every photograph from every decade. A mid-weight crewneck or quarter-zip in a heathered oatmeal, navy, or a proper Scottish moss green does more for a golfer’s silhouette than any technical mid-layer, and it ages in the right direction. Ralph Lauren has spent forty years selling the fantasy of this exact sweater; the genuine article often comes from a mill in the Borders whose name nobody outside knitwear knows. Either way the rule is the same: buy the one that will look better in ten years, not the one that photographs best now.
Links style is the only golf fashion where the weather is a collaborator rather than an inconvenience. Dress for the wind and you will accidentally look correct.
— ParTee GC
The Trouser Question
This is where links dressing is quietly won or lost. The technical jogger, so persuasive on a dry range, becomes a liability the moment the ground is wet and the wind is up — it clings, it flaps, it reads as gym rather than golf. The links answer is a slightly heavier, wind-resistant trouser with a clean break and enough structure to hold its line in a gust. Cut matters more than brand. A trouser that behaves in weather is worth three that only work in a photograph.
What the Players Will Wear
Expect Tommy Fleetwood, the Southport local, in something understated and correct — he has always dressed like a man who learned the game on this coast and sees no reason to overstate it. Expect the Malbon and Eastside Golf contingent to make their case for streetwear-adjacent links style, with mixed and occasionally wonderful results. Expect at least one American to arrive dressed for the Georgia sun and spend Thursday visibly regretting it. And expect the best-dressed man on the property, as ever, to be some 70-year-old member in a fifteen-year-old sweater and a flat cap, walking the ropes, entirely indifferent to all of it. He is the point. The rest of us are just catching up.