From Bronx golf to double pleats: Neil Tan’s Public Drip

Public Drip’s origin story starts with a small apartment and somewhere else to go. In GOLF.com’s October 2026 interview, founder Neil Tan described returning to golf during the pandemic while working from a 400-square-foot New York City apartment. At Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, the game offered outdoor respite and contact with different kinds of people. That municipal setting became central to the label he founded in 2020.^[1]

Tan’s map of inspiration extends beyond the course. He told GOLF.com about the subway, tennis and pickup basketball and pickleball: shared city spaces where people enter a game and find company. The connection is social rather than architectural. Public Drip is not presented as clothing that reproduces New York’s streets; its name expresses Tan’s interest in the places where participation begins.^[1]

He had made clothes before he made golf clothes. As a teenage skateboarder, Tan designed T-shirts and sold them from his car boot. Returning to golf revived that entrepreneurial impulse, encouraged by the brands and communities he encountered. “This is not the golf that I remembered it to be,” he told GOLF.com. That was his personal reassessment of the game, and the opening he saw for his own contribution.^[1]

The collar is the clue

The interesting turn is that Tan’s skateboarding background did not confine his references to T-shirts. His conversation with GOLF.com moves into Harris tweeds, knitted ties and suit collars: details associated with getting dressed deliberately. He wanted some of that pleasure in everyday clothes, including those worn for golf. Vintage-inspired shapes and modern fabrics became the means of connecting those interests.^[1]

The first Public Athlete Polo, introduced in 2022, makes that approach concrete. GOLF.com identifies a cutaway knit collar and a non-rectangular placket as signature features, with the shirt designed for tucked or untucked wear. The collar gives a familiar golf garment a more particular identity; the two ways of wearing it leave room for different degrees of formality. Neither requires dressing as a different person once the round ends.^[1]

The later garment details carry the same conversation further. Product descriptions reproduced in GOLF.com list double front pleats, a tapered straight leg, an elastic waistband and an internal drawcord on the Anywhere trousers. The Retro Polo uses a jacquard knit and mother-of-pearl buttons, while the Triborough long-sleeve polo brings in waffle texture. These details make the connection to traditional menswear tangible, even where the listed fabrics are nylon or polyester blends.^[1]

Read together, the pleats, patterned knits and distinctive collars explain the menswear influence more clearly than a general claim to nostalgia. Tan is borrowing recognisable elements of dressed-up clothing without reproducing an entire period outfit. Meanwhile, the municipal course and shared city spaces supply the purpose he describes: a sense of belonging in which personal style has room to remain visible.^[1]