Patricia Henson is, by my own declaration, the poster girl for golf fashion in the Philippines, though golf itself was never where her story began.

“It was basketball. I didn’t really care much about fashion. I was this little tomboy that just cared about basketball,” she tells me. Fashion crept in only later, once she drifted into content creation and modeling and had to reckon, for the first time, with how she presented herself.

The pandemic pushed her toward golf, if only because there was little else left to play due to the Covid restrictions. Her then-boyfriend, now her husband, Didi Peters, was already an avid golfer, though Patricia didn’t understand the appeal at first. When she first joined Didi on the course, one question immediately occupied her mind: How does one dress appropriately for a game that has always been so particular about its dress code?

So she raided her own closet instead: Zara knits, going-out tops, nothing built to survive 18 holes. It worked, in its own way. Eventually Didi broke the news that those clothes wouldn’t hold up and brought her to an actual golf store as his proposed solution. While she was standing in the pro shop, it, in fact, only introduced a new problem: “Too loud, or the fit isn’t great.” So she assembled a hybrid wardrobe of her own instead.

She remembers, with precision, the first outfit that felt genuinely like her: not the mini skirt and mock neck most women default to, but heavy, boxy dress trousers paired with a fitted knit polo. “I felt so cool and powerful,” she says, “even though my game sucked.” The silhouette leaned boyish, fitting for a woman who still thinks of herself as the tomboy in basketball shorts and a plain tee.

While Patricia recounted her beginnings in golf, a parallel story kept surfacing in my head: Gloria Minoprio, the golfer who arrived at the 1933 English Ladies Championship, stepping out in a black toque, a black fitted blouse layered with a scarlet jacket, and trousers tailored so tightly they might as well have been a second skin. All this came in an era when women were expected to play in skirts that fell below the ankle, when even rolling up a jacket sleeve on the links was considered scandalous, lest some poor onlooker catch sight of a bare wrist or forearm in public. The galleries likened her to Mephistopheles, though she seemed entirely unbothered. I still don’t know who won the championship that year, but I remember Gloria. Nearly a century and an ocean apart, Patricia carries that same self-belief. “It’s got nothing to do with dressing like a girl,” she told me. “It’s more about being able to wear whatever you want, and what expresses your inner confidence.”

Women’s golf participation has climbed roughly 35 percent since the pandemic. Patricia tells me that brands abroad have learned to take advantage of that wave, from Malbon Golf’s louder silhouettes to sponsorships of players like Charley Hull and Minjee Lee. Golfers are known as much for what they wear on the course as for how they play it — signed to the same apparel line, but exuding persona in their own singular ways. “To see someone up there like that, wearing something so unique, carrying it the way they do, it really grabs your attention,” Patricia explained. “And then you kind of want to emulate that as well on the course.”

Patricia admits that the Philippines hasn’t caught up, still leaning on polyester pro-shop wear while mere Shopee and TikTok Shop stores quietly fill the gap. The culture lags, too — Patricia has been reprimanded more than once for wearing a skirt that only looked short on her given her height. It’s a small thing, in the grand scheme of a column, but not a small thing at all in my estimation, because it says something about how the sport still expects a woman to explain herself. And for what exactly?

Now for anyone hesitating on the sidelines, Patricia’s advice is aggressively simple: nobody cares how badly you play. It’s about walking into a room that has historically told women they don’t belong, and choosing to walk in anyway. “It’s never going to work if you never work on yourself to be brave enough to try something,” she says. There is no clean fix for the culture, as far as she’s concerned. “If you feel uncomfortable with guys around, suck it up and show up. It takes more of us showing up to make the atmosphere genuinely more welcoming for women to be there.”

Yes, clothing can serve as a gateway into golf, or simply spark the curiosity of women who once felt intimidated by the sport’s preconceived notions. But Patricia was never a mannequin. Through her craft, she projects a kind of fearlessness that stands in stark opposition to a sport that still has men predominantly written all over its zip code. She carved out her own space within the landscape, indifferent to the opinions circling around her. And although she carries the title of”influencer” as her profession, she remains the clearest example there is of what influence in practice actually looks like.

When I asked what she’d tell women who want to be like her, her answer summed up this entire column in one line: “If you want to be like me, you’ve got to be more like you. That’s the only way.” Not a wardrobe, not a formula. Just the courage to wear your heart on your sleeve, as cheesy as that may sound. So ladies, don’t let yourselves be hemmed in by the standards placed on women, including the moments you feel daunted by picking up something new. What a woman wears is an outward expression of an inner self, and because clothing carries so much of our values and our character within it, this was always a conversation worth having beyond the scoreboard.