Golf didn't invite us
We're walking on anyway.
Fourth floor of a Shinjuku department store: a twenty-three-year-old tries on a knitted vest with a small ball embroidered on the chest. He hasn't held a club in three years. He buys it.
Saturday morning, a Berlin flea market. Argyle cardigan, heavy lambswool, size L, twelve euros. It goes home with someone who will never play a round.
In Gangnam a girl walks out of a screen golf room with a leather bag over her shoulder and carries it the way you'd carry a handbag, because to her that's what it is.
None of the three is thinking about the swing. They're thinking about the cut, the colour, the picture they'll take afterwards. DEASMAG has been writing about that gap between a gesture and the clothes built for it since the day it started. From this issue we write about it on the course too. The section is called THE LOFT.
Collar or nothing
A Berlin club and a golf club ask a newcomer exactly the same question: do you know how to dress. Golf has a written code — collar, long trousers, proper shoes — and an unwritten one that counts for a great deal more. It has an archive you can hold: Payne Stewart's plus fours, Pringle argyle, the shetlands of New England campuses, the knits that vintage dealers in Tokyo price like artworks. It has tribes that despise each other politely, the long-standing members against the twenty-year-olds who turn up in a hoodie. And it has conflicts that end up pinned by the clubhouse door, line by line, as a list of what you may not wear.
Rules, archive, tribes, conflict. Those are the four things that make any scene worth reporting, and DEASMAG has chased them through techno, through tailoring, through design collectives. Golf has had all four for more than a century. Almost nobody has thought to look at them the way a fashion magazine looks at things.
Augusta is the dullest place in golf
Search for golf in the Western press and you get Augusta, trophies, an April of azaleas: the most photographed place in the sport and the least interesting.
The rest is scattered, and it has no capital.
In Scotland the course is common ground. The Old Course at St Andrews has been shut to golf on Sundays for centuries when locals asked Old Tom Morris to open it he refused, on the grounds that if the golfer doesn't need a rest, the course does so on a Sunday morning the town is out on it, running, walking dogs, having a picnic, kicking a ball about. Half the archive comes off that coastline: Fair Isle, shetland, tweed, a palette borrowed from wind and low cloud.
In England the archive was stolen. From the late seventies the football casuals went after Pringle golf jumpers and Lyle & Scott clothes lifted from their fathers' side of the fence — and wore them on the away trains. Golf dressed the terraces before it dressed the greens. Today the traffic runs the other way: Manors, a London label started in 2019 by three friends, sells to people who have never held a membership card.
Italy watches almost no golf and quietly supplies it. Biella spins wool that gets knitted somewhere else and sold under somebody else's name, and nobody has ever told that story from the finished-garment end.
Sweden has the date. J.Lindeberg was founded in 1996; a year later its first golf collection went down a New York Fashion Week runway and onto Jesper Parnevik skin-tight trousers, diamond-pattern tank tops, the cap with the peak flipped up. Golf clothing became fashion news before it was sports news.
America turned the course into a logo industry. Malbon, Los Angeles, 2017. Eastside Golf, out of Atlanta, started by two Morehouse men, Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl Cooper, whose Jordan collaboration was built around 1961 the year the PGA of America finally struck out its "Caucasian-only" clause. Not a neutral history, and they don't pretend otherwise.
Then Asia, where the thing moves fastest. An Aoyama shop will give you department-store house labels working in wool from Bishu, Japan's wool country; workshops making caps in dozens rather than thousands; luxury golf as a category of its own since MARK & LONA began designing it in Tokyo in 2008. In Seoul golf has stopped being a sport for middle management: indoor-range spending by Koreans in their twenties rose more than tenfold in 2022. They book a screen golf room the way they book karaoke, change in the toilets, post the photo before the first shot. Korean brands design for that ritual the pleated skirt cut shorter than permitted, the glove in a loud colour, the visor that keeps off no sun at all but frames the face. The course is the pretext. The clothes are the fact.
We're going to all of it. The shops, the mills, the screen rooms, the clubhouses where the rulebook is still typed. We'll talk to the people who design this, shoot it and dress it, and we'll do it before they turn into names.
We don't care about your swing
The Loft will not hand you a swing tip, review an iron, or tell you who won on Sunday. Other titles have done that well for decades.
What's here is a way of dressing. An idea about colour. A course architect who talks like a landscape designer. A 1974 polo shot the way you'd shoot an archive piece, because it is one. Anyone arriving from DEASMAG gets a fashion story that happens to take place on a green, a clubhouse read as a social space, a musician who collects knitwear. Anyone arriving from golf keeps scrolling and ends up inside the rest of the magazine. That is exactly the point.
The name is the angle between the clubface and the ground — the measurement that decides how high the ball goes. We liked that it's a technical term with a word inside it our readers know for entirely different reasons.
A kid in Shinjuku buys a vest.
The gesture is small.
Small gestures are what we write about.
