The Future of Golf is Streetwear. The Future of Streetwear is Golf.
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One of the things that made Tiger Woods an iconic figure in golf — aside from the 15 Major championships, pop-cultural phenomenon, and the myriad ways he revolutionized the game – was that he had a uniform. Unlike almost every other tour player in the aughts, Tiger didn’t tee off in a striped polo with a doofy sponsorship patch – at least not on Sunday. Tiger wore an unadorned red Nike polo on the final day of each tournament. When he put it on, he played to win.
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Now, the Nike polo is no more. On January 8, Woods announced that he’d be ending his multi-decade relationship with sneaker giant and earlier this week he announced his new apparel brand, Sun Day Red, produced in partnership with TaylorMade. As usual, his timing is perfect. Golf is in the middle of a massive vibe shift, one that could bust its apparel market wide open, helping its signature fashions cross over much in the way that skate style once did thanks to brands like Supreme.
If you haven’t heard, golf got stupid dumb huge during the pandemic. When COVID first hit, golf courses were some of the only places that people could hang out while remaining socially distant. Millions of people with a lot of free time did exactly that and the groundswell of interest in the game among younger and more diverse players, created a market for golf stuff that could be worn on the street in Silverlake, Brooklyn, Deep Ellum, and Logan Square.
Broadly speaking, that means clothes that take heritage style and experiment with things like fits, materials, and patterns, embracing influences as far-ranging as hip-hop to vintage car advertisements as a way of speaking to the multifaceted self of the latest wave of golf enthusiasts.
“If golf is getting younger and cooler, there’s going to be a subset of that population that has a high taste level and is looking for tasteful shit,” says Lawrence Schlossman of the fashion-focused Throwing Fits podcast. When Schlossman spoke to SPY, he specifically cited the Los Angeles-based Metalwood Studio, which puts out schizzed-out pieces with boxy fits, and the NYC-based Whim Golf, which straddles the line between playful and prep, as two of his favorite nouveau-golf brands. Another brand worth noting is Malbon — the O.G. of the space, founded by Stephen and Erica Malbon (the folks behind the magazine FRANK151) — which just landed Jason Day, who finished 18th on the P.G.A. money list last year, as its first sponsored golfer on Tour.
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But the market is quickly getting crowded. A slightly abbreviated list of competitors…
Malbon: Streetwear-inflected apparel and accessories, known for its collabs with brands like Nike, and, most recently, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Whim Golf: The two-person company and darling of the menswear community offers classic course style for “creative agency” types. Currently on a DTC hiatus, save for an incredibly sick bag and head cover collection.
Metalwood: Freaky-haute chic. Think dual-tone double-knee pants, deep-fried neon button-up shirts, and oversized camo hats.
Radda Golf: Sly flips on classic country club staples — a no-button polo here, some digi-camo there.
Todd Snyder: The reigning collab champ has a line with FootJoy that grafts seersucker onto the contemporary jogger form.
Bogey Boys, a vanity brand from Macklemore (yup), that slings’ golf-appropriate baseball jerseys, all-over checker print getups, and polos patterned after the Newport cigarettes box. Bit edgier. Shockingly cool.
ACL Golf: Started by O.G. menswear blogger Michael Williams, ACL Golf (it stands for “A Continuous Lean”) has you covered for tasteful puffy pullovers and genuine Scottish wool sweaters. For the aging Throwing Fits listener.
Mullie Golf: Yeah, new stuff is cool, but another route to golf style is vintage pieces, loving rescued from thrift shops and dead stock stashes. It’s an app platform thingy.
It’s not at all clear as of now, who the big winner is likely to be, but it is clear that these are golf brands with non-golf appeal. In other words, these are scalable apparel businesses with golf branding. Where Tiger once helped Nike sell to golfers, he could now be in the position to be a wedge with a bigger crowd. Get the golfers and others will follow.
That just wasn’t the case a decade ago.
“If you zoom out to where capital-F Fashion is right now, everyone’s wearing really ill-fitting and baggy pants and oversized shirts. I think the golf wear silhouettes of the late 90s and early 2000s match that,” says Cole Young, the former creative director of Malbon who struck out on his own with Metalwood Studio. “We’re not reinventing the wheel,” he continues. “We’re making traditional golf products, but recontextualizing them [in a way] that draws from things outside of golf.”
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