AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — Jason Day was looking for a new identity with his clothing, having spent his entire career with two of the most famous apparel brands in sport. He wanted something that would make him stand out on the golf course and feel fashionable off it.

He got every bit of that with Malbon Golf last year at the Masters.

Day chose a sweater vest, white with large letters stretching across the front that spelled out “No. 313. Malbon Golf Championship.” He recalls wearing a rain suit Friday morning on the 14th tee as he resumed the rain-delayed first round alongside Tiger Woods and Max Homa.

“Max and Tiger said, ‘That’s kind of boring,’” Day said. He already had been turning heads with his Malbon Golf attire the past four months, most of it baggy, a throwback look in golf.

“I said, ‘Wait until you see what I have on underneath.’ I take my jacket off, and they didn’t know what to say. As I was playing, it got crazier and crazier on social media.”

Maybe a little too crazy for Augusta National. The club determined the logo was a bit over the top and asked that he not wear it that afternoon.

His agent, Bud Martin at Wasserman Media Group, got word — by then it was the talk of the Masters and points beyond — on his way to the course and dreaded the idea of having this conversation in the 30 minutes before Day teed off for his second round.

“I was getting ready to make this speech and he said it was too hot and he wasn’t going to wear it anyway,” Martin said.

And then there was Stephen Malbon, who founded the company with his wife, Erica, after a creative art career in subcultures from surfing to snowboards, fashion, graffiti and hip-hop. Behind a passion for design and a newfound addiction to golf, Malbon’s brand already was making traction in the golf world. It exploded that day.

Malbon likes to say that “everyone knows who we are, for better or worse.”

This was a little of both.

“It had like 3 billion impressions those two days on the internet,” Malbon said. “Tiger made the cut. You had Bryson (DeChambeau) and the Jesus photo when he picked up the sign and put it on his shoulder. Some other player told one of the patrons to (expletive) off. And the only thing they were talking about was Jason and his sweater.”

That was the better part of it.

The worse was something Malbon is determined to change through his streetwear design.

“Golf is intimidating,” he said. “There was a lot of young people who probably looked at Jason that day and said: ‘Wow, golf might be for me. He looks cool.’ And then he gets mocked and ridiculed and teased by all the commentators and then they’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not going out there. If they’re mean to him, they can be mean to me.’

“The Master is the Super Bowl of golf,” he said. “That was a great opportunity to show golf can be different.”

That was Malbon’s objective when he launched the brand in 2017 from a studio in Los Angeles. The idea was to make golf more appealing to a younger, style-conscious generation. Day, a 37-year-old Australian who once rose to No. 1 in the world, turned out to be a good fit.

Martin had met Malbon a few years earlier and struck up a relationship. Day’s deal with Nike was up (he was with Adidas at the start of his career) and he was looking for options. For starters, he didn’t like showing up at a tournament worried that he would be wearing the same scripted clothes as another Nike golfer.

“That’s kind of how it happened,” Day said. “I was going to do my own custom clothes and Bud came to me and said, ‘What about this brand Malbon?’ They could do anything for you, any fabric you want, any style you want, any way you want.”

He realizes some of the apparel can look “wacky.” Day doesn’t care as long as he likes it. He also doesn’t mind the abuse when a design is rarely seen in golf.

Such was the case on a cold day at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am this year. Day wore what looked like an old-school, gray sweatsuit. It’s called “Lost Luggage” sweatpants. They looked like pajamas. Not everyone was crazy about them.

“I remember somebody sent me a text or a tweet that ‘JDay has come out of bed and gone to the golf course,’” Day said with a laugh. “It doesn’t take much to look different. When you look on the range, everything is performance-based, athletic. That’s great, no problem.

“But the next generation are kids picking up golf for the first time,” he said. “And fashion is a big part of their world.”

Malbon Golf since has added Charley Hull, the LPGA star known for her devil-may-care approach to life and golf, the player known last year for having a cigarette dangling from her lips as she signed autographs at the U.S. Women’s Open. Hull is huge on fitness and fashion.

Other additions are Minjee Lee with a more classic style, and Nataliya Guseva of Russia.

And now it’s back to the Masters, where Day and Malbon have submitted — and had approved — their lineup of clothing for the week. There appears to have been some negotiating.

“After the first two runs, we were on the same page,” Martin said.

Day wanted his own clothes and Malbon Golf needed a golfer to pitch them. Day has an equity stake in Malbon and is involved in some of the design work, where he wants to be edgy without crossing what can be a fine line. That was Malbon’s objective all along with Day.

“He believes in us and he believed in us early,” Malbon said. “Kudos to Bud for taking it to him. He could have easily not. But it means a ton to us. We went from maybe 5% or 10% of the golf world who knew who we are to everyone knowing who we are.”

And then he paused before adding with a laugh, “For better or for worse.”

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AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf

When Lakota artist Marty Two Bulls Jr. looks at the Black Hills of South Dakota, he doesn’t just see its natural beauty. He also sees a scar cut deep into the heart of the universe.

The mountain range is central to the origin story of several tribal nations, including his, and it has become an international symbol of the ongoing struggle for Indigenous land rights and the destruction of sacred sites. To the Lakota, Mount Rushmore is the most visible scar on the mountains. The former gold mine beneath is another, and that’s what motivated Two Bulls to use his performance art to cleanse it.

“You hear ‘land back’, and it means a lot of different things to different people,” he said, referring to the Indigenous-led movement to restore tribal self-determination through ownership and stewardship of their homelands. “It’s been interesting trying to reframe some of these conversations about stewardship and land rights and treaties.”

When the green pines on top meet the blue sky above, it creates the perception of a black outline, which is why the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people call it “He Sapa’, which means “black ridge.” To them, it is where their creation began. But for generations, this sacred place was mined and stripped of gold, leaving lasting marks.

Today, the former Homestake Gold Mine, a 300-mile (480-kilometer) tunnel system carved inside the mountains, houses the Sanford Underground Research Facility, where scientists study particle physics and dark matter. The deep mine shafts encased in granite are ideal for research into the secrets of the stars.

As an artist in residence at SURF last year, Two Bulls felt a connection to its depths but a tremendous sense of loss when he ventured into the mine.

“I was bearing witness to the desecration that Homestake did every day. It was heartbreaking,” he said. And it left him wondering: “How do you recover from a desecration or a crime?”

Two Bulls also respected the work being conducted by some of the world’s top minds inside the Black Hills, and he wanted to find a way to show them that this place was important long before its value was measured in gold or scientific research. He decided the best solution was also the simplest: smudge.

Smudging is the act of cleansing, spiritually and physically, by burning plants like sage, cedar or sweetgrass and enveloping one’s self or a space in the smoke. It has been a common practice across Indian Country for generations. Last week, using sage donated by Native people from as close as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and as far away as the West Coast, Two Bulls burned several bundles, each representing the prayers of the community that donated it.

For an hour, he burned the bundles in a small stove at the entrance to the former mine, fanning the flames with eagle feathers to smudge the place that his people revere as the center of the cosmos.

Sensors in the mine nearly a mile below ground detected the smoke, a spokesperson for SURF said.

“To see how that was put together, that floored me,” said Rylan Sprague, a botanist and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who chairs SURF’s cultural advisory committee. “Leave it to an artist to take something that seems so regular and turn it into something totally different.”

Two Bulls said Western science often overlooks or misunderstands Indigenous ways of thinking about the world and our origins, and that he wants his art project, called Azilya — the Lakota word for smudging — to be a way for the two to meet. An exhibition of his art from his time at SURF exploring that concept is currently on display at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Several researchers and members of SURF’s staff watched Two Bulls smudge the mine. Sprague said he could see from the looks on their faces that the SURF employees in attendance understood the reverence Two Bulls and his community have for the place where they work.

The room was largely quiet as Two Bulls sent smoke and prayers a mile beneath the earth’s surface.

“It’s not a site that I think they think about as a sacred site. It’s a work site,” Two Bulls said. “I hope that that happens. That’s my intention.”

NEW YORK (AP) — What’s in a suit?

According to curators busy prepping the newest Met Gala exhibit, a whole lot more than tailoring: history, culture, identity, power and, most of all, self-expression.

“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” this year’s spring show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, will be launched as usual by the star-packed Met Gala a few nights earlier, on May 5. It’s the first Met show to focus exclusively on Black designers, and the first in more than 20 years to have a menswear theme.

As always, the exhibit inspires the gala dress code, and this year’s — “Tailored For You” — makes clear that guests are invited to be as creative as possible within the framework of classic tailoring.

In other words, expect a lot of great suits.

“Everything from Savile Row to a track suit,” quipped guest curator Monica L. Miller, a Barnard College professor of Africana studies, considering the versatility of a suit. She sat recently in a conference room at the Met with photos and notes plastered on the walls. She was in the middle of writing descriptive labels for the more than 200 items in the show — an exhaustive (and exhausting) task.

The suit, Miller said, “represents so many things.” And tailoring, she added, is a very intimate process.

“It’s not just about getting a suit that fits you physically,” Miller said, “but, what do you want to express that night?

It was Miller’s 2009 book, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” that inspired the show and led Andrew Bolton, curator of all the blockbuster Costume Institute shows, to bring her in as guest curator. The show uses dandyism as a lens through which to explore the formation of Black style over the years.

“Dandyism was about pushing boundaries,” Miller said.

Behind her, a section of wall was devoted to each of the 12 themes that divide the exhibit: Ownership, presence, distinction, disguise, freedom, champion, respectability, jook, heritage, beauty, cool and cosmopolitanism.

The early sections will begin with the 18th century and focus more on historical artifacts, with later sections looking at the 20th century and beyond. In addition, each section will begin with historic garments, accessories or photographs, and end with contemporary fashion.

Getting the first look at all this, on the traditional first Monday in May, will be a high-powered crowd from the worlds of entertainment, fashion, sports and beyond. Gala co-chairs this year are musician-designer Pharrell Williams, Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton, actor Colman Domingo and rapper A$AP Rocky; NBA superstar LeBron James is honorary chair.

If that weren’t enough star power, this year, there’s an additional host committee with athletes like Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens, Hollywood figures like Spike Lee and Ayo Edebiri, musicians like Janelle Monáe and André 3000, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and other artists, playwrights and fashion figures.

As each year during cocktail hour, they and other guests will be free to put their drinks aside and tour the exhibit before the lavish dinner begins. This year, exquisitely tailored celebrities will examine other examples of exquisite tailoring — as well as historical artifacts like a horse jockey uniform worn between 1830 and 1840.

In an installation room late last month, a museum staffer worked painstakingly on restoring those jockey trousers, a pin cushion at the ready. Near her, two items were already hanging on mannequins. One was a classic Jeffrey Banks suit from 1987, a double-breasted jacket and trousers paired with a dapper plaid wool coat, the ensemble finished off with a light pink tie.

“See how the coat and suit play off each other,” noted Miller.

Next to it was a very different kind of suit — a denim jacket and trousers embellished throughout with beads — by a far less widely known designer: Jacques Agbobly, whose Brooklyn-based label aims to promote Black, queer and immigrant narratives as well as his own Togolese heritage.

The show makes a point, Miller said, of highlighting designers who are well known and others who are not, including some from the past who are anonymous. It will veer across not only history but also class, showing garments worn by people in all economic categories.

Because there are not many existing garments worn or created by Black Americans before the latter part of the 19th century, Miller said, the early part of the show fills out the story with objects like paintings, prints, some decorative arts, film and photography.

Among the novelty items: The “respectability” section includes civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois’ receipts for laundry and tailoring. “He’d go to Paris and London, he would visit tailors and have suits made there,” she said.

And the “jook” section includes a film clip of the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers — who in 1943’s “Stormy Weather” produced one of the most astounding dance numbers ever to appear on film.

“We wanted to show people moving in the clothes,” Miller explained. “A fashion exhibit is frustrating because you don’t see people in the clothes.”

Miller wondered aloud whether there might be a stretch material in the pair’s tuxedos (they perform multiple splits coming down a staircase). She also noted that the tuxedo, like the suit in general, is a garment that cuts across social categories. “If you are at a formal event the people serving are also in tuxedos, and sometimes the entertainment is in tuxedos, too,” she said.

“It’s a conversation about class and gender.”

The exhibit opens to the public on May 10 and runs through Oct. 26.