By Paul, Founding Editor, +21 Handicap
Issue 006 | The ReRun
The short version: golf’s current style moment feels brand new. It isn’t. British football fans found golf’s wardrobe first, back in 1977, decades before streetwear “discovered” it. I found my own way in through a fashion job, not a fairway, years before I’d swung a club with any intent. Two different routes in, same mechanism: the look arrives first, and the round comes after, if it comes at all.
I found golf at Hypebeast, in the thick of building something we called HYPEGOLF. I hadn’t picked up a club with any real intent since I was seventeen. Then my manager landed in the UK and said we were golfing. First hole, I made par. Golf had been waiting. I just needed someone to say yes for me.
That’s not really a story about a good first hole. It’s a story about how I ended up caring about golf at all: not through a lesson, not through a membership, but through a job that had nothing to do with playing the game and everything to do with the culture sitting next to it.
Is golf’s style moment actually new?
It doesn’t feel new. TikTok fits, crossover labels, names nobody in a clubhouse has heard of, all of it outselling the old country-club brands. Everyone’s talking about it like it just arrived.
It didn’t. In 1977, British football fans started wearing golf jumpers, Lyle & Scott and Pringle specifically, straight off the pro shop rail and onto the terraces. Lyle & Scott’s own brand history describes the label as having become “synonymous with football culture” in the UK off the back of exactly that crossover, and the Museum of Youth Culture has archived the whole movement in detail. It wasn’t a stylist’s idea. It was football fans raiding a wardrobe that had nothing to do with them, years before anyone thought to call it a trend.
Why did football fans start wearing golf clothes in the first place?
The honest answer is stranger than “they liked the jumpers.” The look wasn’t stolen for style. It was camouflage. Football’s “Casuals” subculture deliberately avoided club colours through the late ‘70s and ‘80s, partly to blend in and avoid the police attention that came with looking like a football fan on a match day. Golf’s expensive, quiet, unremarkable leisurewear did exactly that job. Nobody built that connection on purpose. Golf just happened to make the right kind of alibi.
That’s the part that never gets told alongside the fashion story. The crossover wasn’t about golf being cool. It was about golf being invisible, in exactly the way a certain kind of person needed it to be.
What proof is there that it’s happening again?
It went quiet for decades after that. It isn’t quiet now. The global golf apparel market sits at roughly £3.76bn this year, and the fit is arguably doing more work in that number than the round is: much of that spend isn’t coming from people booking tee times, it’s coming from people building a wardrobe. Golf’s overall reach, meanwhile, is up 30% since 2016, and the strongest growth by a distance is coming from under-35s, not the traditionalists the sport used to be built around.
You can see the same pattern in who’s actually fronting golf’s biggest apparel moments right now. The ambassadors leading recent golf-specific campaigns for major activewear brands didn’t find their fame through golf. Their fame comes from film, from motorsport, from somewhere else entirely. Their fans are the new audience golf’s being introduced to, whether golf itself asked for that or not.
The brands doing the actual work on the ground aren’t the old country-club names either. UK labels like Manors Golf, Three Putt Golf and Khalhon are building identity-first, not clubhouse-first, the same way Malbon and Bogey Boys have done in the US. None of them are trying to look like members. That’s the point.
Why is this happening so much faster the second time around?
A stadium took decades to notice what its own crowd was wearing. A For You page takes a scroll. That’s the entire difference between 1977 and now: the mechanism is identical, culture reaching for golf’s wardrobe before golf reached back, but the distribution speed isn’t. What took a subculture years to spread across British terraces now spreads across a platform in an afternoon.
That’s also why it’s easy to miss that this has happened before. Golf’s own culture keeps leaving the building before golf does. It slips out sideways, into football terraces, into streetwear, into whatever a For You page decides is next, and by the time anyone in golf notices, it’s already left again.
Does it matter that some of these people will never play a round?
I don’t think it does, and I’d go further: I think that’s the actual story, not a footnote to it. Some of the people the look is reaching right now will never book a tee time, and that’s not a failure of the moment, it’s just the door being wider than it used to be. Wearing it doesn’t require playing it. It never has. Not in 1977, and not now.
Quick answers
When did football fans first start wearing golf clothes? 1977. British football fans began wearing golf jumpers, particularly Lyle & Scott and Pringle, straight off the pro shop rail and onto match-day terraces.
Why did football fans start wearing golf jumpers? Football’s “Casuals” subculture deliberately avoided club colours through the late 1970s and 1980s to avoid police attention on match days. Golf’s quiet, expensive leisurewear worked as camouflage.
How big is the golf apparel market right now? Roughly £3.76 billion globally this year, according to a Parmore Golf / LifeLabs study.
Is golf participation actually growing? Yes. Golf’s overall reach is up 30% since 2016, with the strongest growth among under-35s, per National Golf Foundation data.
Your own way in
If the fit is the reason you started paying attention to golf before the game itself gave you a reason to, you’re not the exception here, you’re most of the story. That’s true whether your route in was a football terrace forty years ago or a fashion job last decade.
I’d like to hear yours. Drop a comment and tell me what actually got you into golf, if it wasn’t golf. Someone reading this is one good excuse away from booking their own first round.
Sources: 1977 football-casual crossover history from Lyle & Scott’s own brand history and the Museum of Youth Culture’s “Casuals: Football and Fashion” essay, corroborated by FashionBeans, Lower Block, and 80s Casual Classics. Police-evasion detail corroborated across Museum of Youth Culture, Lower Block, and the Casual Hooligan Brands archive. Golf apparel market figure (£3.76bn) from Parmore Golf / LifeLabs study, 2026. Golf reach and under-35 growth data from the National Golf Foundation, 2026.
I started Room 19 because I wanted golf writing that treated the game the way the culture magazines I actually read treat everything else, properly, not as tips, gear reviews and FOMO shots of golf courses. If you want the next one first, subscribe below.
Paul is the founding editor of Room 19, a golf brand telling the untold stories of the game for people who found it through culture, not the clubhouse. He took up golf at 37. Find Room 19 on Instagram and TikTok.