There is a particular stubbornness built into golf culture — the starched collars, the members-only formality, the unspoken rule that self-expression stops at the clubhouse gate. For decades, the sport's dress codes kept a younger, more creatively inclined generation at arm's length. Then a kid from Virginia Beach who had spent his career publishing underground culture magazines, running advertising campaigns for Nike and Toyota, and curating the creative energy of New York's nightlife decided to go back to his roots. The result is Malbon Golf: the Los Angeles lifestyle brand that did not just make golf cool — it made golf relevant again.
The Man Behind the Brand: Stephen Malbon's Pre-Golf Life
Understanding Malbon Golf requires understanding Stephen Malbon, and his backstory reads less like a golf founder's biography and more like a cultural curriculum. Raised on a farm in Virginia Beach, Malbon grew up at the intersection of nature and subculture. His early years were shaped by local skate shops, surf culture, and snowboard trade shows in San Diego that he attended as young as thirteen. By his early teens, he was already studying how the skate, surf, and snowboard industries branded themselves differently from anything else he had seen — a lesson that would eventually form the DNA of everything he built.
He dropped out of high school, moved to Colorado, worked in a snowboard shop, and eventually put himself through the Art Institute of Atlanta, where he studied visual communications. It was there that he created the first issue of The Frank Book in 1999 — a pocket-sized quarterly spotlighting underground culture, featuring early contributors like RZA, Lenny Kravitz, and graffiti legend Futura 2000. That publication grew into Frank151, an internationally recognised media company that eventually published in English, Japanese, French, and Portuguese. Through his agency BON, Malbon ran campaigns for HBO, Nike, and Toyota, and helped launch the Scion car brand. Decades before he ever started a golf brand, Stephen Malbon was already one of streetwear culture's most credible creative operators.
Golf, in all of that, was mostly a ghost. He had played as a teenager, caddied at Hell's Point Golf Club in Virginia Beach at age twelve, but stepped away at sixteen when social life took over. He would not return seriously until his mid-thirties — relocated to Los Angeles, burned out from decades of agency work and nightlife, he found himself on a municipal course and suddenly remembered why he had loved the game in the first place.
The Origin Story: Noticing the Culture Gap
Stephen Malbon has described his return to golf as his "third phase of addiction." Playing as much as he could in LA, he began to notice something the golf industry had ignored: a culture gap. Teenagers picked up the sport, dropped it around age sixteen when life got interesting, and did not return until their thirties. He had lived that exact pattern. But more than the participation gap, he noticed the visual language of golf — the brands, the marketing, the apparel — said nothing to the people he had spent his career documenting: artists, musicians, skaters, creatives who discovered Jordan sneakers through basketball and streetwear through skate shops.
The brand began as an Instagram mood board. Malbon started posting images that showed how cool and beautiful golf actually was, framed through a visual lens closer to Hypebeast and Complex than Golf Digest. His wife Erica — who co-founded the acclaimed Los Angeles wellness brand The Now — recognised what he was building before he fully did. Together, they launched Malbon Golf in 2017 out of Los Angeles, growing a community first and making product second. Early on, the brand's Fairfax Avenue shop carried Nike Golf footwear alongside crested hats bearing the now-iconic Buckets logo, and PGA Tour players including Rory McIlroy, Cameron Champ, and Tony Finau came by for activations during Riviera tournament week. The community was forming, and it was doing so from culture inward rather than sport outward.
The Buckets Logo: A Golf Ball With a Point of View
Every great brand has a mascot that carries its philosophy in compressed visual form. For Malbon Golf, that is Buckets: a golf ball wearing a bucket hat. The bucket hat is a direct reference to skate culture, hip-hop, and streetwear — an item that appeared on rappers in the nineties, surfers, and festival-goers. Putting it on a golf ball is a statement: this is golf, but it is your golf. It belongs to the people who wear it, not to Augusta National.
The Buckets character has expanded across collaborations into a flexible visual language. When Malbon launched its NFT initiative — the Buckets Club — it commissioned one thousand individually unique Buckets characters inspired by pop culture touchstones ranging from the Grateful Dead to The Flintstones, each a 1-of-1 illustration. The Tiger Buckets sub-collection applied a tiger variation of the mascot to premium polos, all-over-print bucket hats, and club headcovers. The logo works because it refuses to take golf too seriously while the quality of the product underneath it remains completely serious.
Design Philosophy: Golf Without the Gate
Malbon does not describe itself as a golf brand. The official positioning — stated directly on the brand's website — is a lifestyle brand revolutionising the sport by weaving in the energy of fashion, music, art, and design. That distinction matters in practice. A golf brand makes product for golfers. A lifestyle brand influenced by golf makes product for people who want to live a certain way, and golf is part of that life rather than the whole of it.
In concrete terms, this means Malbon avoids the loud patterned polo that defined golf apparel for a generation. Collections lean into silhouettes and colourways that feel at home in a streetwear boutique: straight-leg chinos, heavyweight mock necks, relaxed fits, and understated tonal palettes punctuated by bold graphic moments. Construction is technical — moisture-wicking fabrics, waterproof uppers on footwear, compression linings in shorts — but the aesthetic reads fashion-first. You can wear a Malbon polo on the back nine and to dinner without changing. That dual utility is not accidental; it is the strategy.
The brand's investment in women's golf reflects the same inclusivity. Malbon signed LPGA players including Charley Hull and Jeongeun Lee6, the 2019 US Women's Open champion, alongside rising players like Bianca Pagdanganan and Gigi Stoll. Hull, who claimed multiple victories in Malbon apparel after signing in January 2024, noted she first became aware of the brand simply by seeing how many people were wearing it — organic spread through cultural visibility rather than traditional sponsorship.
Collaborations That Span the Full Width of Culture
One of the clearest indicators of Malbon's genuine cultural positioning is the range of its collaborations. Most golf brands collaborate with other golf brands. Malbon has built partnerships that span contemporary culture from end to end. With Nike Golf, Malbon produced limited performance capsules that blurred the line between technical and lifestyle gear, a relationship that goes back to the brand's earliest days on Fairfax Avenue. With New Balance — a collaboration at least three years in the making by 2024 — the partnership produced co-branded polos, mock necks, pants, shorts, and multiple colourways of the New Balance 550 Golf shoe, including exclusive colourways available only through Malbon. With adidas, Malbon reworked classic performance silhouettes through its streetwear lens. And in 2025, a collaboration with Jimmy Choo confirmed that golf-streetwear had fully arrived inside the fashion establishment. Additional partnerships with Girl Skateboards, Undefeated, Beats by Dre, and luxury swimwear label Vilebrequin collectively map the cultural territory the brand occupies — and the brand's presence in the video game PGA Tour 2K23 places it where a younger generation of golf fans already spends time.
The Pro Roster and the Celebrity Orbit
In January 2024, former world number one Jason Day ended his seven-year Nike sponsorship to sign with Malbon Golf. Day walked onto the course at The Sentry in Maui wearing baggy dark-blue pants and the full Malbon wardrobe, and the brand immediately gained twelve thousand Instagram followers and four hundred million press impressions. Stephen Malbon subsequently revealed that several other Nike-contracted players reached out about potential partnerships in the weeks following Day's debut — a remarkable indicator of which direction the sport's relationship with apparel was heading.
The current Malbon roster includes Jason Day, Charley Hull, Freddie Couples, Anthony Kim (who, after winning at LIV Golf Adelaide, chose an equity stake in Malbon over a cash payment), Michael Block, Sungjae Im, Minjee Lee, Jeongeun Lee6, Garrick Higgo, and Jesper Parnevik. Skateboarding icon Eric Koston — a genuine crossover figure between skate culture and golf — has been an ambassador from early in the brand's development.
Beyond professional golf, Malbon's cultural orbit includes some of the biggest names in entertainment. Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake have both been photographed at Malbon's Melrose Avenue boutique. Travis Scott and ScHoolboy Q are regular Malbon wearers — at the 2023 Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Stephen Malbon personally caddied for ScHoolboy Q. Stephen also co-hosts the Par 3 Podcast with former NBA player-turned-collegiate-golfer J.R. Smith and actor-jeweller Ben Baller.
The New Golf Movement: Why the Sport Is Shifting
Malbon did not create golf's cultural renaissance, but it arrived early enough, and with enough credibility, to help define it. The brand launched in 2017, and three years later the sport was broadly described as the hottest game on earth — a status accelerated by the pandemic, by Netflix's Full Swing bringing professional golf's human drama to new audiences, and by social media making the aesthetics of the sport shareable for the first time. Rappers, NBA stars, and fashion figures began appearing on courses with genuine enthusiasm: Drake, J. Cole, Steph Curry, Travis Scott. Golf gear began appearing in streetwear contexts. Dress codes relaxed at courses across North America.
Brands like Malbon — alongside Eastside Golf, Metalwood Studio, and Bogey Boys — represent a generation of golf labels built by people who came from outside the sport's traditional gatekeeping structures. They share a conviction that golf had been unnecessarily restrictive, and that opening it through fashion, community, and cultural partnership would bring in exactly the people who had been told for decades the sport was not for them. Golf participation figures across North America have risen steadily, with the demographic profile growing younger and more diverse each year. Timing, as Stephen Malbon has said, was "amazing" — but the vision was there first.
How to Style Malbon Golf
Malbon's genuine versatility is one of its most compelling practical qualities. The pieces translate from the first tee to the 19th hole and beyond, and they pair exceptionally well with the footwear brands Gallery Streetwear carries alongside the collection.
On-Course: Build around a Malbon straight-leg chino or technical short in a neutral tone — beige, olive, or navy. Layer with a Malbon polo or mock neck, and finish with the Malbon x New Balance 550 Golf shoe, whose waterproof upper, on-course traction, and clean late-'80s silhouette make it as much a performance choice as a style statement. A Buckets-logo cap or bucket hat completes the look. The guiding principle is tonal discipline: let one piece carry the visual weight and keep the rest of the fit clean.
Off-Course: A Malbon hoodie or sweatshirt works as the centrepiece for everyday wear — now a legitimate piece of golf culture in its own right. Pair with the Malbon Braxton Pant in beige or olivine and finish with New Balance 550 or On Running Cloudmonster in a clean white or neutral colourway. Both carry the same performance-conscious, lifestyle-first energy that Malbon's apparel embodies. For warmer weather, a Malbon co-branded polo over a long-sleeve tee works equally at brunch and the driving range. The through-line in any Malbon styling is effortlessness — the clothes do the work.
Ready to build your kit? Shop Malbon Golf at Gallery Streetwear to browse the current collection, including polos, outerwear, headwear, and accessories. For a wider look at the golf category, Explore the Gallery Golf collection and see how the sport's most forward-thinking brands come together in one place.
Find Malbon Golf in Kelowna
Gallery Streetwear, located in Kelowna, BC, carries Malbon Golf as part of its curated selection of premium streetwear, athletic lifestyle, and golf-adjacent apparel. As the Okanagan's destination for culture-driven fashion — stocking brands that move between sport, street, and style without compromise — Gallery is the natural home for Malbon in the interior of British Columbia. Whether you are a golfer who has always suspected the sport should look better, or a streetwear enthusiast discovering that golf culture has finally caught up with your taste, the collection is worth exploring. Shop Malbon Golf at Gallery Streetwear and find out why the fairway has never looked this good.
