Royal Birkdale has a habit of dictating what players wear. The 154th Open Championship, staged over the Southport dunes from 16 to 19 July 2026, did something rather different. For once the Lancashire coast declined to behave like a links in July, and the scripting that had been packed for horizontal rain and sideways wind was quietly left in the locker. Thursday opened at 82°F under mostly clear skies, with winds of eight to fourteen miles per hour gusting to twenty. By Sunday the temperature had eased to 73°F with a north-westerly breeze and only the faintest threat of a shower. Across four days there was no significant rain at all.
That single meteorological fact reframed the whole week of golf clothing. An Open played in warm, dry conditions is the opposite of the story the championship usually tells. Waterproof shells stayed in bags. Mid-layers were shed by mid-morning. What became visible instead was the base layer of a player’s scripting — the polo, the trouser, the shoe — held up to four days of television coverage with nothing to hide behind. In that unusually exposed environment, one brand looked comfortably the most assured.
adidas had the strongest visual presence of the week at Birkdale. It was not simply a matter of how many players were wearing the three stripes; it was the coherence of what they were wearing. Ludvig Åberg, Collin Morikawa and Rasmus Højgaard each presented a distinctly different mood, yet all three drew from the same underlying design language, and all three were dressed for the conditions that actually arrived rather than the ones the forecast models had feared. Åberg’s week ended in a share of ninth at five under par, a solid return in a championship eventually won by Ryan Fox at ten under, and one that kept a strikingly styled player in front of the cameras until Sunday evening.
For golfers in the UK who follow this sort of thing closely, the practical upshot is that a good deal of what appeared at Birkdale is genuinely obtainable. Function18 has spent more than twenty years buying designer golf clothing for a nationwide network of players, and the tour-level adidas pieces that defined the week sit within reach rather than behind a rope.
Ludvig Åberg and the Geometry of a Warm Links
Åberg arrived at Birkdale with a palette that had no business working on a links course and worked anyway. Pink, grey and white, arranged in geometric patterns, is a combination that sounds better suited to a hard court than to marram grass and pot bunkers. In the flat, bright light of a dry Open week, however, it read as clean rather than loud. The geometry gave the outfits structure without resorting to the heavy blocking that so often makes links scripting look defensive.
The Swede’s footwear choice reinforced the point. He played in the Adizero ZG, a shoe built around low weight and ground feel rather than the armoured, weatherproofed construction that Open fields typically default to. In a normal Birkdale July that would be a gamble. In this one it was simply the correct read of the ground conditions, and it suited a player whose swing depends on a stable, quiet lower half rather than brute leverage.
Åberg’s tied ninth finish, alongside Ryan Gerard at five under, meant that palette was on screen through the closing stretch. It also underlined something adidas has been pushing for several seasons: that a young player can be dressed distinctively without being dressed as a novelty. Function18 offers golfers access to the adidas ranges these looks are drawn from, including the lightweight footwear that made rather more sense at Birkdale than the traditional links alternative.
Collin Morikawa’s Case for Restraint
If Åberg supplied the graphic energy, Morikawa supplied the counterweight. His Birkdale scripting worked in pastels set against deep neutrals, with florals used sparingly enough that they registered as texture rather than pattern. It is a difficult balance to strike. Softer colours can look washed out on a course with very little vertical scenery, and floral prints in golf tend towards either the ironic or the garish. Morikawa’s avoided both by keeping the motifs small and letting the neutral tones carry the weight.
The technical centrepiece was the Ultimate365+ Climacool polo, constructed in adidas’s Butterspun material. The name is marketing, but the intent behind it is not: a fabric with a soft, fluid hand that sits away from the skin and moves air. On a Thursday afternoon at 28°C, that mattered far more than any waterproof rating. He wore a special spiked version of the Adizero ZG, keeping the low-profile silhouette while retaining traction on firm, fast turf.
There is a wider lesson in Morikawa’s week for club golfers, particularly those who have watched British summers grow warmer and less predictable. Breathable, lightweight construction has become the default requirement rather than the specialist one. Function18 stocks the current Ultimate365 and Climacool lines, which means the fabric technology that governed how the world’s best played in the heat is available to golfers approaching the same problem on a Tuesday evening at their own club.
Rasmus Højgaard Turns the Volume Up
Højgaard took the opposite approach to Morikawa and did it with conviction. His scripting leaned on vivid colour, tempered by prints subtle enough to keep the outfits from tipping into fancy dress. The Ultimate365 Tour Deco polo was the anchor piece — a tour-specification garment given a decorative treatment that would have looked out of place at a rain-lashed Open and looked entirely at home under blue Lancashire sky.
His footwear was the most interesting call of the three. The Retrocross Gripmore is a golf sneaker in the truest sense: trainer-inspired above, lugged outsole below, designed to work on a course and then keep working afterwards. Seeing it at an Open Championship, rather than at a tour stop on manicured parkland, said something about how firm and dry Birkdale played. It also said something about where golf footwear is heading, with the boundary between the golf shoe and the street shoe growing steadily thinner.
That crossover has been one of the more durable trends in golf clothing, and it is a category where Function18 has long been ahead of the high street, carrying the trainer-styled adidas silhouettes alongside the more conventional spiked models.
Climacool Over Gore-Tex: The Week the Weather Changed the Brief
The temptation with any Open is to talk about waterproofs. Birkdale 2026 made that conversation redundant. A cooling trend from 82°F on Thursday to 73°F on Sunday, cloud cover without meaningful precipitation, and steady but unremarkable winds of eight to fourteen miles per hour meant the equipment question shifted entirely. The problem was not staying dry. It was staying cool while walking twenty-odd miles over dunes in direct sun.
That is precisely the brief Climacool was built for, and it is why adidas looked so well prepared. Ventilated construction, engineered mesh zones and fabrics like Butterspun are not glamorous innovations, but they are the ones that determine whether a player is still comfortable on the sixteenth tee on day four. The players in the mix on Sunday — Fox, Cameron Young at nine under, Sam Burns at eight, Tommy Fleetwood and Scottie Scheffler tied at seven — were all managing heat rather than weather.
Warm, dry Opens remain the exception, which is exactly why the week was instructive. A wardrobe built solely around waterproofing leaves a golfer badly equipped for the days that actually turn out pleasant. Function18’s adidas range spans both ends of that problem, which is a more useful proposition than any single hero product.
What Birkdale Revealed About Modern Golf Dressing
Championship scripting is often dismissed as decoration, a bit of colour to fill the gaps between shots. Birkdale suggested otherwise. Stripped of the layers and shells that normally obscure it, what players wore became legible in a way it rarely is at an Open, and adidas came out of that scrutiny best because its three most visible players were each solving a different problem well.
Åberg made a graphic, unconventional palette look composed over four days of contention. Morikawa demonstrated that restraint and technical seriousness are not in conflict. Højgaard showed that vivid colour and trainer-derived footwear now belong at the sport’s oldest championship rather than at its margins. None of it depended on the weather being dramatic. All of it depended on the clothing being right for the conditions in front of it.
For the club golfer, that is the transferable idea. The gap between what a tour professional wears in July and what is sensible for a warm Saturday medal has narrowed considerably, and the pieces that closed it — the Climacool polos, the lightweight Adizero footwear, the crossover sneakers — are the same items available through Function18, in stock and shipped worldwide. Birkdale simply provided four unusually clear days in which to see them properly.