Culture
Masters fashion: Stretching the concept of quiet luxury underneath a giant oak tree
Follow live coverage of the final round of the 2025 Masters
AUGUSTA, Ga. — The Masters will never be cheugy.
It may be a crime of fashion to be overdone, outdated or, gasp, dressed in millenial-core for 51 weeks a year. But for this week, at Augusta National Golf Club during the Masters, the patrons come dressed for the scene they find when they step on property, and there’s something about the place that makes it all work.
The open space between the clubhouse, the first tee and the practice green at Augusta National is like the Shibuya Crossing of golf. Spectators shuffle in every which direction, creating a dizzying blur of rye green, seersucker and straw hats. The Green Jackets gather under the canopy of the legendary oak tree, schmoozing with VIP guests, while groups of done-up women meander about, greeting each other and dishing out compliments on floral dresses from the latest spring collections: “Oh I love that! Where’s it from?” Meanwhile, the golf bros walk with purpose to find their next vantage point, as spikeless golf shoes and big box brand dry-fit polos do exactly what they are supposed to do: perform.
From the old to the young, to the PGA Tour superfan and the clueless significant other, the patrons at Augusta National all have one thing in common when it comes to their varying fashion choices: They’re trying to say something.
The spectators at the Masters take full advantage of the opportunity to be, well, extra.
For the men, this effort manifests in a competition as old as time. The Country Club Logo Olympics begin at 7:00 a.m. Monday, when the patron gates open for the week’s first practice round. At the Masters, the idea of “quiet luxury” is not just a Hermés bag or a pair of Chanel ballet flats, but also needlepoint whales and acorns stitched onto canvas golf hats.
It’s impossible for a few not to catch your eye: Pine Valley on a navy polo, Seminole Golf Club on a cashmere pullover. Spot the ultra-private Ohoopee Match Club onion? Or the lesser-known but mighty crest for one of Scotland’s finest, North Berwick Golf Club? It might spark a conversation. That’s exactly what they want.
“You see these logos and you’re like, he definitely knows a member. But you’re not sure if he is a member. But if he is a member, I need him to be my friend,” says Stephen Malbon, founder of Malbon Golf, a lifestyle brand that has partnered with PGA Tour pro Jason Day to stretch player fashion past slim-fit golf pants and shades of blue.
That’s the least of it. Turn to the left or right anywhere on property and it won’t take long to find the GOAT: The Augusta National Golf Club logo. It is not to be confused with the Masters logo. These are very different things.
There’s already an exclusivity to the idea of purchasing Masters merchandise because it is only sold on site. When you get there, there are about 19 other elevations beyond what you can take home from the massive merchandise building, which contains 64 check out registers and 385 mannequins and sells everything from $400 cashmere hoodies to scented candles and gnomes. Now Augusta National has Berckmans Place and Map & Flag, two brand new and hot-ticketed hospitality venues that also sell their own apparel. The holy grail is, of course, the club’s intimate pro shop. That’s the only place one can purchase an item that is simply adorned with the coveted “ANGC.” Yes, those four letters make the difference.
“There are people flexing their Berckmans merch. And that’s different from the main merch. And the pro shop merch is different from that merch,” says Malbon. “There’s levels to it. People are showing their social or economic status by wearing this stuff.”
For men at the Masters polos and khakis are de rigueur. (Kyle Terada / USA Today Sports)
For the women of Augusta National, there’s an understanding that you dress for the female gaze. Admit it or don’t, you’re scrolling Pinterest and TikTok in the months leading up the tournament to find outfit inspiration for your Masters outfit, which, if you’re attending Thursday-Sunday, will not be seen on an Instagram feed (unless you film an “outfit check” in the parking lot.) Cell phones are prohibited from the Augusta National grounds and cameras are only allowed on practice round days. You dress to impress, though, even if the internet may not see it.
“The key to fashion at the Masters is not necessarily clothes that you’d wear to play golf. Those outfits are great for other golf tournaments. For me, the Masters is more like the Kentucky Derby of golf, minus the hat and definitely minus the heels,” says Golf Channel’s Kira K. Dixon. “If you wear a hat, it should just be a really good wide-brim hat because sun protection is key.”
“Wear something really cute that you wouldn’t normally wear, blow it out of the water. Wear the wide leg pants, wear the fun blazer, wear the fun print. This is Augusta National. Do it.”
A pop of green is the first aesthetic necessity for women at the Masters, but there are always ways to go above and beyond.
Annie Shoulders and Kylie Shemanksi stood on the ropeline of the fifth fairway at Augusta National, waiting for Jordan Spieth’s Thursday pairing to find the short grass. Shemanski’s name was stitched onto the back of her white sweater in green letters in the style of the traditional Masters caddie bibs — a creative touch. But then Shoulders turned around for the grand reveal.
She had painted her square-shaped crossbody purse by hand to look like a pimento cheese sandwich.
“I knew I was going to do this for about a month,” said Shoulders, an engineer from Little Rock, Ark., attending her second Masters. “I also made sweaters for (Shemanski’s) daughters.”
(Michael Madrid / USA Today Sports)
There’s a decadence to the women at Augusta National. Round, flat-brim straw hats and monochrome matching sets have been two popular trends in 2025. Color combinations of Masters green — also known as Pantone 342 — and Butter Yellow, the season’s hottest spring shade, have been plentiful. Adidas Sambas are the tournament’s most popular shoe, with New Balance 327s coming in as a close second. Dixon, who has received hundreds of direct messages from Masters ticket-holders asking for outfit advice, coined a term to describe the style: “Augustacore.”
The local boutiques in Augusta make it their mission to capitalize on Masters week. The Swank Company prepares inventory with the proper color schemes and accessories for patrons in need of a last-minute shopping trip. The Peppy Poppy says that Masters season is their second-most profitable time of the year, behind only Christmas.
“Masters style is always going to be the same: Something green and something stylish and comfortable to walk around in,” says Dawne Byrd, owner of the Peppy Poppy.
The fashion circus at the Masters feels like it could get old really fast, but somehow, it just never does. There’s a sense of, if you’re at Augusta National, why wouldn’t you go all out?
“When I told my sister that we were going to the Masters, her first question was ‘What are we going to wear?” says Kiara Dowdell, who was wearing a matching cardigan with her sister, Alexis Vega.
(Peter Casey / USA Today)
The players and their sponsors participate in the frenzy too, with pre-planned weekly scripting and outfit choices that they wouldn’t make at any other golf tournament. For example: Cam Smith wore a four-way stretch blazer during Wednesday’s practice round. It was the result of a drunken conversation with the man who makes said blazer.
The tournament participants are focused on the task at hand, but they’re also aware of what’s going on around them.
“When you’re walking the golf course, everyone looks like they’re having a good time. Everyone is dressed up really nice,” Day, who is known for pushing the boundaries with his on-course attire, says. “It’s kind of like a horse racing event when everyone comes out and they’re wearing some really nice clothes. They just do it right here at Augusta.”
The Masters is not just a golf tournament. It is different. So naturally, the patrons, in all sorts of ridiculous ways, are going to treat it like a one-of-a-kind opportunity. And that allure will never go out of style.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Andrew Redington, Richard Heathcote / Getty Images; Rob Schumacher, Kyle Terada / USA Today Sports)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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