At club level through to the professional ranks, golf fashion often creates debate. Women & Golf considers whether there are any dress code rules for tour players.
By Lewine Mair
At club level through to the professional ranks, golf fashion often creates debate. Women & Golf considers whether there are any dress code rules for tour players and what the future might hold.
One of the most oft-repeated questions from members of the public at this year’s Ricoh Women’s British Open at Woburn concerned the players’ attire and whether or not there was still a dress rule in the women’s professional game. The questions, it seemed, were mostly prompted by a handful of maybe over-short shorts and skirts and some rather zealously cropped tops.
There certainly used to be some pretty rigid criteria on the women’s professional tours, with the officials concerned even going so far as to put a measurement on what was an acceptable length for a pair of shorts. Nowadays, though, it seems that anything goes (at least within reason) and, while that is no bad arrangement, it has certainly contrived to have club committees in a bit of a spin. How can they be telling their members what to wear when, at a far more lofty level than theirs, women are not having to adhere to any given set of rules.
Almost certainly, the matter will be aired at any number of golf club AGMs over the coming months. (In which connection, if anyone wants to seek advice from the Ladies’ Golf Union, they had better do it soon because we can be pretty sure that the R&A, whose starting point for their amalgamation with the women is 1 January, would be horrified at the notion of getting involved in disputes of that nature.)
Club dress rules, of course, can be different from one club to the next. There are still those establishments who decree, with inadvertent ambiguity, that trousers and shorts must be removed before a player enters the lounge. Collarless shirts may or may not be OK, while no-one was surprised when, very recently, a leading manufacturer had to think again when he came out with a fetchingly hooded top which would have been just the thing for slightly windtossed conditions: the hood could be put on and off without being in danger of getting lost along the way. It was when someone suggested that club committees would throw up their hands in horror at the prospect of having ‘hoodies’ darkening their doors that the manufacturer had to rethink the range.
Another point worth making is that young players with a bit of imagination can still exercise their design talents without doing anything to give offence. Paula Creamer, who never looks less than magnificent on the course, will tell you that most of her ideas have come from the Eastern brigade, with specific reference to the Koreans and the Japanese who know a thing or two about bright and even clashing colours. The Japanese, more than anyone else, go in for glitter and pretty brooches on their caps, while more and more are opting for oriental-type collars.
So it is back to the original question about dress rules on the various tours. It is probably safe to say that the tooskimpy stuff will disappear without them - and that something else may come into fashion which offends the easilyoffended even more. At Woburn, there was the tongue-in-cheek comment that the women professionals might one day go back to those appalling tweed skirts that were all the rage in the early 1900s. Yet whichever way things go, nothing maybe matters more than that club officials should refrain from setting regulations which prove off-putting to the young and newcomers to the game. No-one can afford for that to happen.
What do you think about the dress code debate. Should women on tour be forced to follow a dress code or should the regulations be done away with all together? Let us know via facebook or twitter, or contact us at [email protected].
The above is an extract from the November/December 2016 issue of Women & Golf magazine, on sale now. Never miss an issue, click here to subscribe and enjoy W&G delivered to your door.
