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Golf Is Having a Fashion Moment. The Brands Built for It Are the Ones Built Right.
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
For decades, golf apparel meant a collared shirt, pleated khakis, and a logo that belonged on a country club doormat. That era is over. A new generation of brands has arrived, and the ones that survive the growth will be the ones that built the operational infrastructure to handle it.
Golf is having a moment that the industry didn't see coming, or at least didn't see coming this fast.
According to the National Golf Foundation, total golf participation hit a record 48.1 million in 2025, up 55% over the last decade. Female participation is up 46% since 2019. People of color participation is up 61%. The demographic profile of who is playing golf has fundamentally shifted, and the brands dressing them are shifting with it.
The fashion gap that existed in golf for years - the space between what players actually wanted to wear and what the traditional brands were offering, is now being filled by a wave of founder-led labels that understand culture, aesthetics, and identity in ways that Nike, Addidas, and FootJoy simply don't.
This is a brand story. It's also an operations story. And the two are more connected than most of these new founders realize yet.
The Men's Side: Fashion Finally Found the Fairway
The men's golf apparel resurgence isn't a golf story. It's a fashion story that finally found its sport.
Malbon Golf is the clearest example. Co-founded by Stephen Malbon, who also built street style publication Frank151, Malbon brought the sensibility of limited drops, cultural collaborations, and brand identity rooted in community. The collaborations alone tell the story: Adidas, TaylorMade, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Malbon grew 209% between March and August 2025 compared to the prior year. When pro golfer Jason Day left Nike to sign with Malbon, and Augusta National objected to his Masters vest, it confirmed what the market already knew: Malbon isn't playing golf's game. Golf is playing Malbon's.
Bogey Boys, founded by Macklemore, launched in 2021 after he became obsessed with golf during the pandemic and couldn't find anything worth wearing on the course. The brand's vintage-inspired, deliberately irreverent aesthetic led to an Adidas collaboration and a loyal community of golfers who never felt at home in a traditional pro shop. Macklemore has been explicit that this isn't about chasing tour partnerships or mainstream golf credibility, it's about bringing a different kind of player to the game, and dressing them accordingly.
Worth noting in the same breath: Bogey Bros. A separate brand founded by John Koehler and Ryan Rizos, closed $15.5 million in sales in 2024 and projects $22 million this year. Different brand, irreverent energy, serious business results. The fact that brands operating in this lane are gaining real traction says something about how much runway exists here.
Greyson Clothiers operates at a different register entirely - premium, sophisticated, closer to luxury menswear that happens to perform on the course. Detroit-based, it raised $20 million in 2025 from a group that included Justin Thomas, Justin Timberlake, and Larry Fitzgerald. It represents the elevated, fashion-forward end of the men's market: the customer who wants craft and restraint, not a cheeky polo.
Three distinct brand identities - streetwear-rooted, irreverent/viral, and luxury-adjacent - all filling the same void that traditional golf apparel left open for years.
Some Brands With Scale Are Getting the Memo
What makes this moment interesting is that it's not just founder-led indie brands driving the shift. Some of the larger, better-resourced players are reading the room, and doing it thoughtfully.
PXG has always operated with a premium sensibility, but its 2025 Fall/Winter collection showed a brand leaning deliberately into the cultural shift: transitional silhouettes, streetwear-influenced textures, pieces designed to move from course to everyday life. Their design language - utility-forward, technically sophisticated, visually distinct - positions them well for a customer who wants performance and doesn't want to look like every other golfer on the course. PXG has the distribution and production infrastructure to execute at scale. PXG has always known exactly who it's for. The question now is whether that customer and the new golf demographic start to overlap.
Municipal, co-founded by Mark Wahlberg and former Callaway and TaylorMade executive Harry Arnett, was built from day one around an all-day lifestyle arc - gym to office to golf course. Golf isn't an afterthought here; it's structurally embedded in the brand, and the product reflects it with strong silhouettes and color stories that hold up across categories. Where Municipal gets interesting is in how it leads: the gym, the grind, the 4AM mentality. Golf is present, but the activewear and wellness lifestyle tend to anchor the brand identity in practice. For a brand with this much infrastructure and distribution behind it, the question is less about product and more about how sharply the positioning crystallizes as the category gets more crowded.
These brands aren't chasing Malbon or Bogey Boys, they're building a parallel lane for the customer who wants fashion-forward golf apparel with the confidence of an established supply chain behind it. That's a legitimate position in a market this size.
The Women's Side: The Gap Is Real and Still Wide Open
The men's golf apparel conversation gets most of the press. The women's opportunity is, if anything, larger, and significantly less picked over.
For decades, women's golf apparel operated in a narrow lane: performance fabrication in colors that ranged from safe to aggressively cheerful, with silhouettes that treated function as the ceiling rather than the floor. The assumption was that women golfers wanted to look like they were playing a sport. What they actually wanted was to look like themselves.
That gap is now being filled by founders who came from fashion, not from golf. And what's interesting is where they're drawing their aesthetic references from.
Fore All is one of the fastest-rising brands in the space, growing over 300% in under two years - and the story of how it got there is worth understanding. Co-founders Jen Clyde and Michelle Money built their community first, before they built the line. Their personal journey learning golf created an audience organically, with zero ad spend, before a single product hit retail. They organized golf events, partnered with World Wide Golf, and launched a full apparel line in March 2023. Look at the product itself and you'll notice something: that heritage golf green runs through the line consistently. It's intentional. There's a reverence for traditional golf aesthetic woven into the brand DNA. It speaks to the heritage of the sport while making room for a customer the sport hasn't always made room for. I might even add that they are pushing the envelope the most recently - bold checks and prints, inverted pleat skorts, and ultra baggy pants. It works, and it also points to where the category can still evolve.
Fore-té Club Attire is doing something adjacent but distinct. The brand re-imagines country club prep through timeless sets and dresses in functional, contemporary fabrics, built around what they describe as a daily formula for effortless style. It's the intersection of country club heritage and actual wearability, for a woman who wants to look pulled-together on and off the course without thinking too hard about it. The "club attire" positioning is smart - it leans into the traditional golf world's language while quietly modernizing everything underneath it.
Goldie Byrd, founded in 2023 by Arielle Solheim, great-granddaughter of Karsten Solheim, the founder of PING and the Solheim Cup - and Julia Roper, who comes from Revolve, Beyond Yoga, and Fabletics, pulls inspiration from vintage pieces and brings a fashion marketing sensibility that the category desperately needed. California-cool, seasonless, and genuinely covetable. The legacy gives it credibility. The Revolve background gives it commercial instincts.
And then there's Wilson, which deserves a mention here precisely because it isn't a startup. With over a century of heritage in tennis and golf, Wilson has spent the last few years executing one of the more deliberate and credible sportswear revivals in the industry. Their women's collections lean into vintage-inspired silhouettes, pleated skirts, boxy polos, and heritage color stories - tennis-core and golf-adjacent, intentionally designed to move off the court and off the course and into everyday life. Global Chief Creative Officer, Joelle Michaeloff, has been explicit about the intent: honor the past while building Wilson's future as a serious sportswear brand. The Kith collaboration and their Sport Professionals collection signal that this isn't a legacy brand coasting, it's a legacy brand that figured out exactly what it has and is building from it. For the women's golf and racquet sports customer, Wilson has arrived right on cue.
The through line across all of these brands is founders who actually play, who were frustrated by what was available, and who built the brand they wanted to exist. And notably, most of them are still working within a palette and visual language that nods to golf's traditional aesthetic - the greens, the prep, the club references. That's not a limitation. It's a smart bridge between the sport's heritage and a new customer. But there is still significant white space ahead for brands willing to move further, drawing from contemporary fashion and sportswear in ways that feel less tethered to the course's visual history altogether. That next wave has yet to arrive.
The Hard Part Nobody Talks About
Here is where the golf apparel boom gets real for the indie brands and the scaled ones alike.
Malbon, Bogey Boys, Goldie Byrd, Fore All, Fore-té - these brands built their audiences through cultural instinct, strong product, and genuine community. That's hard to do and most brands never figure it out. PXG and Municipal bring capital and distribution. But whether you're a two-person founder brand or a celebrity-backed label, the operational infrastructure required to scale wholesale is a different skill set from the one that built the brand in the first place.
Wholesale at scale means purchase order management that doesn't live in someone's inbox. Inventory visibility that a buyer can trust. Lead times and production timelines built to meet retailer calendars and reorder cycles. Vendor relationships structured for flexibility, not just cost. A back-end that can handle the pace of modern retail without a manual workaround at every step.
Industry data shows that even brands already generating significant wholesale revenue regularly cite inventory visibility and order management as their biggest operational gaps. These aren't startup problems. They're scaling problems, and they show up right at the moment a brand's wholesale momentum is building.
The golf apparel brands arriving at that inflection point right now, the moment when DTC traction creates wholesale demand, are the ones making decisions that will determine whether the growth sticks.
This Is the Moment to Build Right
The golf apparel category is not going back to what it was. Participation is at record levels, new demographics are entering the game, and the cultural permission to make golf clothing that looks like real fashion has never been more open.
Framework Fashion works with brands at exactly this inflection point - founder-led labels with strong product and cultural clarity that are building the operational infrastructure to support wholesale growth, and established brands that need their back-end to match their front-end ambition. Development, Design, Sourcing, vendor management, production calendars, order systems, etc... - the infrastructure that turns a great brand into a scalable business.
The fashion moment is here. The infrastructure is what makes it last.