The Masters is, for golfers the world over, the signal that spring is here and the season is officially open. The first of the four professional major championships each year has a special place in the affections of golf fans, chiefly because Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, the tournament’s home since its inception in 1934, is always presented as a golfing wonderland.

Augusta National’s many famous landmarks, the tournament’s traditions and the debate about who will win will be front of mind during Masters week, but there are other, more subtle considerations, too. Such as how well, or in some cases badly, the world’s leading professionals will dress for the occasion, and will any of the contenders put their Sunday outfits together with thoughts about what will go best with a Green Jacket? And beyond April, who will emerge as this year’s most stylish players at the majors?

So, with style and plenty of substance, we call to the tee seven stylish moments from the last 100 years of major championship golf. Like Augusta National itself, it’s all about the details.

A sporting giant of the Roaring Twenties, Mr Walter Hagen was credited by Sports Illustrated as being the man who “changed the game from a rich man’s pastime to a national craze”. The man known as “Sir Walter” was a regular golf partner of aristocrats, robber barons and international royalty. On one occasion, he kept a US president waiting on the first tee while he shaved. The first golfer to win $1m and, reputedly, to spend $2m, the colourful American cultivated his myth, which included tales of his “valet-chauffeur-caddie” rolling his tuxedo into a ball in the morning so that he could arrive on the first tee looking like he had come directly from a night out. Hagen would even insist on playing the first hole in his dancing shoes.

In 1920, on his first appearance at the Open Championship in the UK, Hagen pulled into the carpark at Deal in an Austro-Daimler limousine he had hired for the occasion. In the trunk, he had 12 colour-coordinated ensembles for the days ahead. Golf professionals were still looked down on at the time, and some of Britain’s poshest clubs refused to allow them access to their clubhouses. Hagen’s response was to have his footman serve him his lunch, washed down with the finest wines, in the limo. He went on to win four Open titles, and 11 major championships in total.

Oh, to have within earshot of this bench in April 1940. Mr Bobby Jones, the archetypal Southern gentleman, competed as an amateur in the 1920s and became one of the greatest American sporting icons. Here, the founder of both Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament holds court with three Texan golfers who would claim six Green Jackets over the next 13 years.

To his left is Mr Ben Hogan, one of the sharpest dressers in the game’s history; a man whose appreciation of craft – perfectly cut trousers, handmade golf shoes and finest cashmere – was rooted in the years of work he put into honing what many consider to be perfect golf swing. Hogan would go on to win the tournament twice, in 1951 and 1953, and initiate the annual Champions Dinner. The bridge on the iconic par-3 12th hole is also named in his honour.

Behind Hogan is Mr Byron Nelson, the champion in 1937 and again in 1942, who would host the Champions Dinner for 50 years from 1956; and Mr Jimmy Demaret, famed for his wise-cracking and dandyish style, and for being first player to win three Masters titles, the first coming a few days after this photo was taken.

Here’s Mr Arnold Palmer talking to the press in the clubhouse at Augusta after winning his second Masters title in three years. With his movie-star looks, muscular physique and blue-collar appeal, Palmer’s heyday coincided with the dawn of the television age, and as such he was crowned as “The King”. Palmer was golf’s equivalent of Mr Elvis Presley; he made women swoon and men want to be him.

Palmer’s style was effortlessly cool. Three-button polos with a tighter fit to show off his brawn; well-cut trousers that were never too long; cardigans slung on like he’d just sauntered from the bar at the country club. Palmer’s gung-ho playing style and raw charisma inspired a following so passionate it was given a name: Arnie’s Army. He went on to win four Masters titles in total. What happened to the golf writing career of Mr Hunter S Thompson (seen here over Palmer’s right shoulder) is anyone’s guess.

Mr Juan Antonio “Chi Chi” Rodríguez was the first Puerto Rican golfer to be inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame, which is some achievement given he learnt how to play the game by swinging the branch of a guava tree. A natural showman, Rodríguez was known for his style (slim silhouette, sunglasses and fedoras with colourful hatbands), his one-liners and for celebrating birdies by covering the hole with his Panama hat or doing a toreador’s sword dance with his putter before thrusting it into an imaginary scabbard. “Golf is show business,” he insisted, “you have to give the fans a show.”

Rodríguez recognised the value of being different but was never less than his own man. His fedora was a key part of one of the iconic golfing looks of the 1960s, and yet it was never adorned with a sponsor’s name: “My father always said your head is the highest part of your body and you never sell it,” Rodríguez explained. In a long career, he won eight titles on the PGA Tour in the US, but was less successful in the majors, where his best finish was a tied sixth. This photo, which underlines why he’s included in this exalted lineup, was taken during the 1964 US Open at Congressional Country Club in Maryland.

On 12 July 1969, the British sporting public held its breath. Mr Tony Jacklin was leading the Open standing on the tee of the final hole. When his arrow-straight drive bounded safely down the 18th fairway at Royal Lytham, the BBC’s Mr Henry Longhurst exclaimed “Oh, what a corker!”, capturing the excitement of an 18-year wait for a home winner about to come to an end.

The son of a lorry driver, Jacklin was young, handsome and emblematic of the “classless society” that British Prime Minister Sir Harold Wilson had promised to deliver. He was also determined to show his American rivals that not only was he a genuine contender, but he could dress just as colourfully as them. This startling mauve and lavender ensemble is a case in point. 

After winning the US Open the following year, becoming the first British player to do so since 1927, Jacklin was rewarded with a ticker-tape parade down the high street in Scunthorpe, waving to the crowds from a white Cadillac.

There are certain golfers – not many, it must be said – that look good in whatever they wear. Mr Severiano Ballesteros was one of them. Like Arnold Palmer, the Spaniard oozed charisma and played golf with flair, imagination and his heart on his sleeve. On Sunday 13 April 1986, he was chasing his third Masters title, which he intended to dedicate to his father, who had recently passed away. Standing in the fairway of the par-5 15th hole, he was in the lead and looked set to go further ahead. Up ahead, though, the veteran Mr Jack Nicklaus was on a charge, sending mighty cheers back across the course to his rivals.

Seconds later, Seve, as he was known the world over, hit one of the worst and most damaging shots of his career, the ball diving into the pond guarding the green. In that moment he handed the initiative to Nicklaus. But that’s not what concerns us here. Look at his visor, and the curious double Nike Swoosh logo. Seve had been wearing an ordinary Augusta National visor all week, like the ones sold in the merchandise tent, but a Nike representative wanted the Swoosh to be clearly visible to the millions tuning in on TV. Seve decided to improvise, cutting the logo from two of his polo shirts and gluing them to the visor, which now has own place — just like his disastrous 4-iron into the drink – in Masters history.

The 2010 Masters Tournament is remembered for many things: the return of Mr Tiger Woods after his “scandal”, Mr Phil Mickelson’s terrific final-day shot from the pine straw on the 13th hole, and, perhaps most significantly, what was happening on the feet of Mr Fred Couples. The man nicknamed “Boom Boom” for the length he generated from the laziest of swings had won the Masters champion way back in 1992. He was also a bona fide Augusta specialist and one of the coolest cats in the game.

At 50 years of age, though, few gave him a chance. Couples led the field after round one, padding around the manicured lawns in a pair of what looked like canvas tennis shoes. Golf shoes up until that point all had spikes, but here was Couples, with his languid gait, in the first pair of spikeless golf shoes anyone had seen — worn without socks, no less. He ultimately finished sixth but according to the Golf Channel, “Fred Couples golf shoes” was the fourth most-searched term on Google that week.

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