Colour is the first thing a television audience registers and the last thing anyone writes about. Ask most golf watchers what happened at Royal Birkdale between 16 and 19 July 2026 and they will tell you that Ryan Fox shot 62 in the third round, birdied the last to win the Claret Jug at ten under par, and that Cameron Young came up a shot short. Ask them what the week looked like and the answers get vaguer. Yet the 154th Open produced one of the broadest colour spreads seen at the championship in years, for a reason that had nothing to do with design departments.
The reason was the weather. Birkdale’s eleventh Open was played in conditions a links in July almost never provides: Thursday at 82°F under mostly sunny skies, a gentle cooling trend to 73°F by Sunday, north and north-westerly winds holding at eight to fourteen miles per hour, and no significant rain at any point. The shells stayed in the bags. The mid-layers came off before lunch. What the cameras saw for four days was scripting in its unobstructed form — polo, trouser, knit, shoe — in flat coastal light that flatters nothing and forgives less.
Under that scrutiny the field split into recognisable colour families: earth tones and autumnal neutrals, soft pastels and washed purples, and high-contrast geometric brightness. These were not accidents of individual taste. They are the three directions the wider apparel industry has been circling for several seasons, and Birkdale gave all of them an unusually clear stage — along with a reasonable indication of what golfers will be buying into 2027. For those inclined to act on any of it rather than merely observe it, Function18 remains the most direct route between a major leaderboard and a wardrobe in Britain.
Earth tones and the autumnal turn
The strongest single current at Birkdale ran through the ground rather than the sky. Sam Burns, third at eight under and in the mix until the closing holes, played the week in greens, khaki and browns. Cameron Young, the runner-up, worked blues against creams, greys and an earthy brown that read almost as tobacco on camera. Jordan Smith held a similarly grounded register of muted blues, greys and neutrals. Jason Day, dressed by Malbon Golf, took the idea furthest of anyone: white, grey and cream as a base, then burnt orange, maroon and brown layered over the top — an autumn palette worn in high summer, and one that looked entirely deliberate rather than seasonally confused.
Burns, Young and Smith were all scripted by Peter Millar, a brand that has built its recent identity around natural fibres and tailored colour, and the coherence showed. Seen together across four rounds, these players formed something close to a movement: golf clothing borrowing its colour card from menswear rather than athletics, and specifically from the stone, moss, oatmeal and rust family that has dominated the wider market since the quiet-luxury turn.
The appeal is easy to understand once you have watched it on a links. Earth tones sit correctly against marram grass, sand and burnt-out fairway, photograph well in strong light without glaring, and do not date. Brands with genuine tailoring lineage have been quickest to translate this properly. Hugo Boss has been cutting golf pieces in exactly this muted, material-led register for years, and Ralph Lauren has arguably never done anything else. Both sit within the range at Function18, which makes the comparison easy to draw in practice rather than in theory.
Pastels, lavender and the softening of the middle ground
The second direction was gentler and, on the evidence of Birkdale, more technically interesting. Collin Morikawa’s adidas scripting was built on pastels set against deep neutrals, with subtle florals kept small enough to function as texture rather than pattern. Viktor Hovland, in J.Lindeberg, opened the championship in a lavender polo before shifting to brindle and black across the weekend — a progression that mirrored the week’s own cooling trend rather neatly.
Lavender is the colour worth watching. It has moved through menswear steadily over the past two years and has now arrived in golf without the apologetic framing that usually accompanies purple in a conservative sport. Worn as Hovland wore it — flat, cut in a technical fabric with clean geometry — it reads as considered rather than showy. Pastels only fail on a golf course when treated as an alternative to white; used as a foil for a strong neutral, they hold up.
There is a practical dimension too. Lighter shades reflect rather than absorb, no trivial matter when the walk is twenty-odd miles over dunes at 28°C. The soft palette at Birkdale was doing thermal work as well as aesthetic work. J.Lindeberg has been the most consistent exponent of this thinking, pairing muted Scandinavian colour with technical construction, and Function18 offers golfers access to those ranges alongside the adidas lines that carried the pastel story on the other side of the field.
Geometry, contrast and the case for brightness
The third group refused to whisper. Ludvig Åberg, who finished tied ninth at five under, spent the week in pink, grey and white arranged in geometric patterning — a combination that on paper belongs nowhere near a Lancashire links and in practice looked among the sharpest things on the course. Rasmus Højgaard went further still, leaning on vivid colour tempered by prints kept subtle enough to stop the outfits tipping into costume.
What separates this from the brighter golf clothing of a decade ago is discipline. The colour is loud; the structure is not. Åberg’s geometry gave his outfits architecture, so the pink functioned as one element of a composition rather than the whole statement. Højgaard’s prints were used at low contrast, so the eye read shape first and pattern second. That is the difference between bold and garish, and it is a distinction the market has taken a long time to learn.
The rules for bright golf clothing have tightened accordingly: one strong colour, one structuring neutral, and pattern at a scale that survives being seen from across a fairway. Puma has long understood the energetic end of this equation, and adidas supplied the tour-level version at Birkdale itself. Through Function18, both are available to golfers who would rather not spend another summer in navy.
How tour colour reaches the club car park
The filter-down from championship scripting to club golf is slower and stranger than the apparel industry likes to admit. Very little transfers directly. What transfers is permission.
A player finishing third in an Open in khaki and brown does more for the earth-tone category in Britain than any lookbook, because it establishes that the colour is serious. A lavender polo on a contender’s back on Thursday of a major quietly settles the question of whether purple is acceptable golf attire. Club golfers rarely copy an outfit; they absorb a signal about what is now normal, then buy something adjacent to it a year or two later.
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The second mechanism is the off-course test. The palettes that succeeded at Birkdale — the stones and rusts, the muted blues, the greys and creams — all pass comfortably outside the golf club, and that is now the deciding factor for a large share of purchases. A garment in burnt orange or moss green earns its keep on a Saturday medal and again on a Sunday lunch. Function18’s buying has reflected that crossover for some time, which is why its range reads closer to a menswear edit than to a pro shop.
What the palettes of 2026 point towards
Predicting colour is a mug’s game, but Birkdale offered better evidence than most weeks because the conditions stripped away the variables. Nobody was dressing for survival. Every palette on show was a choice.
Taken together, the three directions look less like competitors than a widening. Earth tones and autumnal neutrals will keep expanding, because they align with how men are dressing generally and because they age well. Soft pastels and lavender will hold their ground as the technical brands continue to prove that muted does not mean unserious. High-contrast geometric brightness will persist at the sharper end, sustained by younger players who have made it look composed rather than juvenile. Into 2027, the likeliest outcome is not one dominant colour story but a coexistence of all three, with the interesting work happening where they overlap — a pastel against a deep earth neutral, a geometric print in muted stone.
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For the golfer trying to make sense of this, the useful conclusion is that there has rarely been a wider field of legitimate options. The old defaults of navy, white and black no longer carry any particular authority. What Royal Birkdale demonstrated, over four unusually clear days, is that colour in golf has become an expression of taste rather than an accident of what the pro shop happened to stock — and that the gap between the leaderboard and the ordinary wardrobe, available through Function18 and in stock year-round, is narrower than it has ever been.