Looking for signs of a shakeout in the golf industry? Look no further than the rag trade, the sportswear segment that, for the better part of two decades, has supplied an ever-expanding array of mostly knit shirts in luxury cottons and high-tech performance blends to golfers of all stripes and sizes.

There are at least four golf brands — all fairly ambitious, if not entirely robust, businesses at some point in the recent past — that are on hold and won’t be going forward next year: Burberry Golf, Fidra, Izod G and Calvin Klein Golf.

Calvin Klein Golf decided in the last several weeks to regroup and will have no spring 2009 delivery. It’s a sign of how recent the development is that it nearly dressed a winner Sunday when Laura Diaz opened with a first-round 63 and cruised to a third-place finish in the Grand Air China LPGA. Diaz and the PGA Tour’s Heath Slocum were enlisted as ambassadors for Calvin Klein Golf.

Still, Calvin Klein Golf, which launched in 2007, might have been a stretch even in the headiest of economic times. Despite a team of talented designers and experienced executives, Calvin, the brand named for the quintessential Seventh Avenue designer, lacked an organic connection to the golf world and was an attempt to introduce a high-fashion sensibility into a setting where khaki pants, no matter how wrinkled, often suffice as uniform.

Burberry Golf, on the other hand, was very much connected to the golf world as the brand’s founder, Thomas Burberry, actually had a golf course on his estate. Furthermore, selling Burberry Golf sportswear was for several seasons entirely consistent with a storied history of selling upscale trench coats and patterned scarfs to customers long comfortable with the name.

If that weren’t enough, the Burberry Golf team had the good fortune to sign on Adam Scott as their poster boy as they launched in the early part of the decade. Even when his contract with Burberry expired this year, Scott, out of a combined sense of fashion and loyalty, continued to wear the Burberry Golf duds, all the way to the winner’s circle.

IzodG made innovative strides on the design and fabric front, aggressively mixing a number of synthetic blends. Still, it faced an uphill battle, even as it was positioned as the technical, performance-based counterpart of the ubiquitous Izod brand. Licensed to Nancy Haley, the co-founder of Lakewood, Colo.-based Tehama, since 2004 sales are reported to have been around the $15 million mark. An executive with Phillips-Van Heusen, which owns the brand, said it is seeking a new licensee to design and market IzodG.

Fidra struck an authentic note from the start but it’s been essentially absent from the market for nearly a year, with its last season at U.S. retail being fall 2007. And that appears unlikely to change in the near term. The brainchild of the talented John Ashworth and named for an uninhabited island in the Firth of Forth off the Scottish Coast, Fidra was mothballed in the United States by corporate parent Quiksilver. John Ashworth had left Fidra a few seasons before that fateful decision. – Robert Lohrer