The lightweight Antigua Hero undershirt can be worn alone or as a base for additional warm clothing.
In a recent media release of a discussion on the most important trend in men’s golf apparel, Sean Gregg, head designer of Antigua, noted that traditional colors are now perceived as so conformist that changing palettes will be a part of all new introductions. Far more important to most fellows, however, is a more savvy and useful approaching to layering cold-weather undershirts, regular golf shirts and pullovers to guard against rain and wind. There is true art to applying layers and it’s well understood by those who regularly attend San Francisco Giants games, where climate goes up and down like the Dow Jones. For the rest of us, help is on the way.
“The focus is now on developing product from the base layer up,”said Gregg. “Lightweight base layers such as our style Hero developed as a micro-fleeced back jersey mock can stand alone or can be worn under a performance polo such as Exceed, or with a mid-weight pull-over performance fleece style such as Succeed, or under a water and wind resistant wind shirt such as our styles Resilient and Highland. The new mentality from the tour player to the weekend golfer is that they want to be comfortable at any point during play and they look for layering options that correspond with the fluctuations in weather that occur especially during golf ‘season’.”
The next biggest trend, he aded, deals with fabrics and performance specifications. “Like the evolutions in technology on the hard goods side, apparel as a counterpart also focuses on improving playing performance,” said Gregg. “We’ve developed lighter and lighter fabrics with the intention to perform faster with regard to wicking speed while simultaneously being less restrictive and minimizing garment friction during release with our Desert Dry Xtra-Lite (D2XL) fabrics.”
That’s right, he’s saying that in some respect, the clothing can make the golfer. “The need to pull your shirt sleeve up over your elbow before set up has been eliminated from our performance collections by focusing on minor adjustments to specific core fit anatomy,” added the designer. “We haven’t made smaller garments, we’ve made better performing garments while leaving areas like the torso spec intact. And additionally as we grade up in size we cease the taper in fit – realizing that a medium or large fit can be comfortably modified but tapering specs in XL’s on up begin to have disadvantages. And with that, as the population has grown in stature we’ve look to be accommodating in our offering to cater to that evolution as well.”
