by Dana White

At many clubs, shorts must be long and skin is not in. But a showdown is looming between old-school dress codes and new-school style of golf apparel for women

For the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve wrangled a coveted invitation to play in a foursome at an exclusive country club. You’ve been playing golf for only a couple of years on your local public course, where a person could tee off in a bikini if she wanted to. But this is a special occasion, and like a teenager preparing for her prom, you select your wardrobe: a sleeveless white Nike golf dress with a boat neck and a black stripe down the front. It’s very Audrey Hepburn—chic enough, you figure, for a fancy private club.

You’ve figured wrong. Just as you’re pushing your tee into the turf, a man strolls up and informs you that this club has a collar rule. And since that Nike dress lacks said collar, you’ll have to change into something more “appropriate.” Highly annoyed, you ask him where these rules come from. He just shrugs and answers, “That’s the way it’s always been.”

You have now entered the fashion twilight zone known as The Code, where an attempt to make a 21st-century style statement bumps up against attire rules that were established when Eisenhower was in office. Yet like many gender-based conventions in golf, these dress codes seem to be at a crossroads. “Golf fashion” is no longer an oxymoron; designers are creating golf apparel for women that are athletic, pretty and made of performance fabrics you’re more likely to see in a Bally Total Fitness commercial than on a golf course. But not all of these clothes, however attractive, have collars—or demure hemlines, for that matter. And therein lies the problem.

Private country clubs see themselves as among the last outposts of gentility and etiquette, and as anyone who has followed the Augusta saga knows, the golfing establishment can be resistant to social change.

A private club is free to make any rule it wants, and if its board feels that requiring a collar is the best way to stave off an invasion of Hooters T-shirts, then that’s just the way it is. “Dress codes “are a part of the game,” says Nancy Paton, former president of the Women’s Metropolitan Golf Association in Elmsford, New York. “Golf is a game of civility and of manners and of integrity. So it’s appropriate that people dress the part.”

The strictness of these rules and the extent to which they’re enforced vary from club to club, but the fact remains that when it comes to getting dressed, few sports have so many wrinkles. Shirts must be tucked in, shorts no more than two inches above the knee. Tops must have a collar or sleeves or both. No denim or anything resembling denim. No capris, skorts or caps worn backward. Tank tops? In your dreams.

But these days, when designer jeans pass as formal-wear in some circles, what is appropriate? “Many things that people thought were horrible 30 years ago aren’t perceived as horrible today,” says Marty Hackel, fashion director of Golf Digest. “Fashion and style evolve. These dress codes are very static. To say that to be tasteful and appropriate, shorts must be two inches above your knee—that’s a little antiquated.”

Nike, for one, is stirring the winds of change. The athletic-wear superpower is launching an expanded line of golf apparel for women that it hopes will help women “push the envelope” of what’s appropriate (racer-back tops, anyone?). “We feel the women’s golf apparel market has been extremely conservative in the last decade,” says David Hagler, Nike’s director of apparel. Women today, he asserts, “want to dress in a more fashionable, modern way. They dress that way in their everyday lives; they dress that way when they go to work. Why shouldn’t they be given the opportunity to dress that way when they go to the golf course?”

Hagler’s design team takes dress codes into account—to a point. “We’ll say, ‘Okay, we need to have a certain segment of our product be applicable to the private country clubs and their regulations,’” he says. “So, we’ll look at the length of our shorts, and we’ll make sure a high percentage of our tops have collars. At the same time, we don’t want to restrict having a very fashionable line of golf apparel for women at the expense of conforming to regulations. We feel that country clubs ought to look more seriously at those regulations and what’s realistic.”

This sentiment is echoed by other designers, big and small. Kitten with Her Sticks offers unabashedly body-conscious clothes, including a curve-hugging golf dress and a low-cut tank. You could even call the clothes sexy. “I don’t have a problem with sex,” declares designer and CEO Teresa Gutierrez. A striking redheaded actress who named her company after the 1963 Ann-Margret film Kitten with a Whip, Gutierrez yearns for the days when golf and glamour were not mutually exclusive. “Let’s take Dinah Shore,” she says. “She used to wear bodysuits. She put on a scarf and really dressed up. Somewhere down the line, it got to be a more traditional polo-and-Bermuda-shorts approach.” Gutierrez wants to transform the image of golf clothes much the same way that Venus and Serena Williams, with their beaded braids and catsuits, gave tennis fashion a pop-culture makeover. “Why do we have to say that all sports attire has to be conservative?” she asks. “Today, a more confident, more physically fit woman would say, ‘Hey, look, I can wear something that’s showing a little more flesh.’”

How much flesh is too much depends on how old you are. Patricia Dixon, owner of Empowered Women’s Golf in Plano, Texas, says that when it comes to dress codes, there’s a generation gap as wide as the ravine on Pebble Beach’s eighth hole when it comes to golf apparel for women. Not long ago, Dixon posted magazine photos of golfers wearing everything from Bermudas to halter tops on a bulletin board and asked her customers for feedback. “There was one photo of [LPGA Tour Star] Grace Park, and at the top of her swing you could see a little bit of her tummy,” recalls Dixon. “And you should have heard the uproar from the older women! It was like, ‘Oh, she’s showing skin!’ I said, ‘Have you looked in the mall? That’s the look. Everybody’s showing skin. So what? It makes you look like a woman, and what’s wrong with that?’”