Volcano ash, sophistication and disruption: How J.Lindeberg designed Olympic uniforms for Team USA

For Americans tuning into the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, the red, white and blue exhibited on Team USA athletes is bound to inspire patriotism and pride.

But for J.Lindeberg, the first-time official clothing sponsor of the 2024 men's and women's Olympic golf competitions, another word enters the conversation. In fact, make it two: sophistication and disruption.

At an Olympic uniforms fitting at THE PLAYERS Championship in March, where the top 25 American men in the OWGR were invited, Scott Davis, CEO of J.Lindeberg North America, spoke to PGATOUR.COM about the brand’s goals and design process.

“It's been a couple years in the making, getting everything pulled together,” Davis says. “First of all, we agree on a storyboard. It's a whiteboard exercise with alliteration. We see the stars and stripes from a J.Lindeberg perspective. Once you do that, obviously it's pretty straightforward red, white and blue, but you have to build out the whiteboard exercise: Four days of clothing, three days of practice, lifestyle stuff – we build the assortment plan.

“Then go back to our suppliers and say we want the best of the best cooling fabrics. We use 37.5 technology – which is volcanic ash and a natural thermostat that we put into the fiber. When you get hot it cools you down, when you get cold it heats you up.

“From the time we said go, when we signed the contract, we wanted to put the best of the best into these garments, because we knew they were going to be competing at the highest level.”

In golf, uniforms are traditionally associated with team events – there are decades upon decades of Ryder, Solheim and Presidents Cups as precedent. However, Olympic golf, which is contested by individual stroke play, took a century-long hiatus from 1904 to 2016 and is only in its fifth playing overall. So how did J.Lindeberg take on the unique challenge of packaging their team uniforms to spotlight the individual?

It's about relationships and innovation.

“Golf is such an individual sport, and the gold medal for the Olympics is individual,” Davis reflects. “It's been great meeting with some of the best players in the world, who happen to be American players, and listen to their comments about the products – and just what great people they are.

“You can pick up on things you otherwise wouldn't have thought about. Golf is changing, and people that are playing golf are changing. How we'll be measured moving forward is how we can make people more comfortable by what they wear, so they feel better about going to play golf.

“Wearing great clothing that really makes you feel good is kind of like going out at night in your favorite outfit. If we can create a product where people who wear it say, 'Okay, I can do this,' then we've done our job.

“We just want to keep beating the drum and keep doing things that are innovative from a performance standpoint. I always say for our brand, I always want you to feel sophisticated in our product first. And then disruptive. Sophisticatedly disruptive.”

Though some have pointed out the irony in a company with Swedish roots outfitting American men and women – J.Lindenberg was founded in both Stockholm and New York in 1996 – Davis sees this diversity as a point of strength.

“One of the reasons that we were able to secure this contract is our ability to curate the collection,” he says. “We took certain members of the design team in Sweden, married that up with certain members of our team in the U.S. to make sure there was enough synergy there to create a line where it really gravitated globally versus one side or the other. We really worked together.

"I think it shows an air of inclusiveness that says it's not about where you start, it's about where you finish.”

The ethos of working together is evident in how Davis banters with world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and 2023 U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark and jots down measurements for Xander Schauffele, gold medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Games, who doesn’t know his sizes as he “wears a Japanese XL.”

“I worked for Ralph Lauren for a long time,” Davis continues, “And he used to say, ‘As soon as you're in fashion, you're out of fashion.’

“So I think the real question is: Who are you and are you authentic to your true fashion and sport dynamic? And how do you take inspiration from other things and mold it into something that's still very authentic to your aesthetic?"

Let the inspiration, and the Games, begin.