Golf Clothes Worth Wearing: RADMOR x Esquire
We've always believed that the best golf clothing shouldn't require a golf course to explain why you own it.
A polo should feel just as appropriate several hours after the final putt drops. A pair of trousers should work with golf shoes in the morning and something entirely different that evening. A sweater should earn its place in your wardrobe because you love wearing it, not simply because it happens to perform well during a backswing.
Golf is part of life.
The clothes should be too.
That idea has guided RADMOR since we started, and it is one of the reasons the recognition we've received from Esquire has been especially gratifying.
For generations, Esquire has looked at men's style through a particularly broad lens, moving comfortably between tailoring, sportswear, luxury, emerging designers and the everyday pieces that ultimately define how people dress.
Over the past several years, RADMOR has increasingly appeared within that conversation, not only as a golf company, but as a clothing brand whose point of view happens to begin with the game we love.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF GOLF BRAND
Esquire has included RADMOR among its selections of the best golf clothing brands, placing us within a diverse group of companies helping reshape what modern golf apparel can look and feel like.
Read Esquire's Best Golf Clothing Brands
For a small independent company founded in Seattle in 2020, that kind of recognition carries weight, particularly because RADMOR began at the intersection of two very different careers.
Bob Conrad and I first met as teammates on the University of Washington golf team. Bob went on to compete professionally, spending years experiencing firsthand what clothing needs to do when golf becomes your livelihood.
My career took me in another direction.
I moved to New York and spent more than two decades in fashion, founding Paper Denim & Cloth, Earnest Sewn and 3x1 and becoming increasingly obsessed with materials, fit, construction and the emotional relationship people develop with the clothes they truly love.
Years later, RADMOR emerged somewhere between those two perspectives.
One of us understood the demands of golf at its highest level.
The other had spent a career thinking about why certain clothes become indispensable while others disappear from the closet almost immediately.
That combination continues to shape everything we make.
PERSONALITY WITHOUT THE NOISE
Esquire named RADMOR's Tetris Polo its Best Unique Golf Shirt, a recognition that speaks to another idea we've thought about since the beginning.
Read Esquire's Best Golf Shirts
Golf has no shortage of pattern.
Sometimes a great deal of it.
We have never been particularly interested in making something loud simply because loud is easy to notice. Instead, we think about pattern much as we would in any other category of menswear, considering scale, proportion, color and how a garment will feel after the novelty of seeing it for the first time has worn off.
We want our clothes to have personality.
We just don't want them to shout.
The Tetris Polo reflects that balance, bringing graphic interest to a familiar golf silhouette while remaining grounded in the idea that the best clothing should still feel relevant years after it was designed.
Being different isn't particularly difficult.
Making something distinctive that people continue to want to wear is a much more interesting challenge.
MORE THAN A POLO
What has made Esquire's coverage especially meaningful is that it hasn't been limited to a single category.
RADMOR has appeared across its coverage of polos, quarter-zips, socks, shorts, sweatshirts and broader men's style, which reflects something we have always hoped the brand would become.
We never wanted to build a polo company.
We wanted to think about how golfers actually live.
What do you wear when the first tee is 48 degrees and the afternoon reaches 70? What belongs in a bag for three days of golf without making you feel as though you've packed for a corporate tournament? What do you want to put on after walking 18 holes when everyone decides to stay for dinner?
Those questions interest us because golf rarely exists in isolation.
A round becomes lunch. Lunch becomes drinks. A golf trip becomes three days in a town you've never visited. The clothes travel with you through all of it.
Esquire's recognition of our Colton Quarter Zip, for example, speaks directly to that idea of versatility.
Read Esquire's Best Golf Quarter Zips
Performance matters, but so does what happens when performance is no longer the immediate requirement.
The best pieces should move naturally between both worlds.
THE THINGS YOU STOP NOTICING
Even our socks have found their way into Esquire's golf coverage.
Read Esquire's Best Golf Socks
At first glance, that may seem like a small thing.
We don't see it that way.
We spent roughly two years developing our athletic socks because we couldn't find exactly what we wanted to wear. We thought about fiber content, cushioning, breathability, recovery, where seams sit against the foot and how the sock feels after walking five or six miles rather than simply trying it on in front of a mirror.
Materials including TENCEL and recycled nylon were selected because they brought specific qualities to the finished product, not because they made for a better story on the packaging.
Most people will never consciously notice those individual decisions.
That's usually a sign we've done the job properly.
Good design has a tendency to disappear once something works the way it should. The collar sits correctly. The pant moves without pulling. The sock remains comfortable on the seventeenth hole.
You stop thinking about the garment and return your attention to everything else.
That's the point.
GOLF, INSIDE A LARGER WARDROBE
Perhaps the most interesting part of Esquire's coverage has been seeing RADMOR appear not only in golf-specific stories, but within broader menswear.
That crossover matters to us.
We've never believed golf fashion needed to exist in its own isolated universe, particularly because very few people dress that way anymore.
Modern wardrobes are fluid. Tailoring mixes with athletic clothing. Vintage pieces sit beside something new. A technical jacket may be worn over a sweater knit from natural fibers. Golf clothes go to lunch, while clothes that were never designed for golf somehow find their way onto the driving range.
The old boundaries have become increasingly irrelevant.
RADMOR has always felt comfortable somewhere in that space.
We design for golf because we know and love the game, but we don't believe the course should determine the limits of the clothing.
That is the idea behind a phrase we've returned to often:
Always designed to be worn, well, beyond.
Beyond the course. Beyond expectations.
A MORE THOUGHTFUL MATERIAL PALETTE
Running beneath the design is another question that helped inspire RADMOR in the first place.
What should golf clothing actually be made from?
For decades, much of performance golf apparel has relied heavily on virgin polyester because the material works exceptionally well. It is lightweight, durable, easy to care for and capable of managing moisture in ways natural fibers sometimes cannot.
We never saw performance itself as the problem.
We simply wondered whether virgin, petroleum-based polyester needed to be the automatic answer every time.
That led us toward a broader material palette.
We use recycled polyester when technical performance requires synthetic fibers, premium and organic Pima cotton where softness and breathability are more important, TENCEL for its distinctive hand and drape, and merino wool for its remarkable ability to regulate temperature naturally.
An average Taylor Recycled Performance Polo uses the equivalent of approximately 14 recycled plastic bottles in its fabric, transforming existing waste into something useful while reducing dependence on newly produced polyester.
We don't describe any of those choices as perfect.
No garment is impact-free, and sustainability is far more complicated than simply identifying one fiber as good and another as bad.
Our responsibility is to keep improving where we can, to use materials more thoughtfully and, above all, to make things well enough that people want to keep them.
Because a garment worn for years will always tell a more meaningful sustainability story than one designed to be replaced next season.
A SMALL BRAND IN A BIGGER CONVERSATION
Most days spent building an independent clothing company are considerably less glamorous than anyone might imagine.
There are fit samples to review, fabrics that don't behave the way you expected, colors that looked perfect under one light and entirely wrong under another, production problems to solve and countless small decisions that nobody outside the company will ever know happened.
That's the work.
Then occasionally you look up and discover that Esquire has included RADMOR among the best golf clothing brands, or singled out one of your polos, quarter-zips or socks as something worth knowing about.
Those moments are meaningful, not simply because of the recognition itself, but because they suggest the larger idea is beginning to resonate.
RADMOR started with two former college teammates wondering why golf clothing couldn't feel more like the rest of the clothes they actually wanted to wear.
Today, we're still asking essentially the same question.
The answers continue to evolve.
So does golf.
And we're grateful to be part of where both might be going next.
READ THE ORIGINAL ESQUIRE COVERAGE
The Best Golf Clothing Brands | Esquire
The Best Golf Shirts | Esquire