What Is Students Golf? The Man Who Invented the Jogger Is Now Golf's Coolest Designer

Adam R. covers apparel, accessories, and golf culture for DORMIED. He has been tracking brand drops and collaborations since 2018.

What is Students Golf? It is the Los Angeles golf apparel brand founded in 2021 by Michael Huynh, and if that name means nothing to you, one of his creations definitely does: Huynh is the designer who invented the jogger, the tapered sweatpant his streetwear label Publish pioneered in the late 2000s that went on to colonize every gym, airport, and coffee shop on earth. Students is his second act, a fashion-and-lifestyle golf brand built on graphic tees, snarky humor, and the emotional wreckage of amateur golf, and it has quietly become one of the most credible names in the streetwear-golf movement alongside Malbon and Metalwood. This is who is behind it, why it exists, and what the data says about where it is headed.

In one sentence: Students Golf is a Los Angeles fashion and lifestyle golf brand founded by jogger inventor and Publish founder Michael Huynh in 2021, built around the amateur golfer's experience, streetwear design language, and a mission to make golf less gatekept.

What the data shows

DORMIED tracks brand search interest across 10 global markets every month. Here is where Students sits.

Source: DORMIED Index, June 2026 snapshot.

Students is climbing. A 22.7 percent jump in a single month and a four-spot rank gain is the profile of a brand catching a wave, and the timing is not mysterious: the brand's recent collaboration with Sugarloaf Social Club, one of the most anticipated pairings in golf apparel this year, put Students in front of exactly the audience it was built for. At 5,400 monthly global searches, Students still trades at cult scale rather than Malbon scale, but the trajectory and the company it keeps say the ceiling is higher.

The health scare that started it

Every brand has an origin story. Students has an origin diagnosis.

In the years before Students existed, Huynh was running Publish, the LA streetwear label he founded in 2007 and the company that gave the world the jogger. Running it nearly broke him. During a break in a sales meeting with international distributors, Huynh collapsed to the floor with a seizure, the start of back-to-back emergency room visits over 72 hours and a diagnosis of acute hypertension. His doctor's advice was not subtle: pause, or this is going to kill you. Huynh handed day-to-day control of Publish to his business partner, kept his majority stake, and stepped away to put his health back together.

The same doctor suggested golf as a way to relax his mind. Huynh was not sold. His impression of the game, formed entirely through channel surfing, was that it was slow and dull. Then he played, and the addiction took hold the way it does. What he did not find was anything he wanted to wear. On the course he was improvising with Nike ACG pants and plain Uniqlo polos, because golf apparel, in his words, was mundane: take off the logos and it all looked the same.

So the designer did what designers do. He paired the new obsession with two decades of streetwear instincts and launched Students in 2021, with Bryan Lowman, formerly of Stussy, as his business partner. The name is the whole philosophy: in golf, as in life, everyone is a student, and the brand is built for the amateur, not the aspiring pro.

What Students actually makes

Students started deliberately off the course: graphic tees, hoodies, and pullovers for golfers who wanted to signal the obsession away from the first tee. Huynh reasoned that launching into on-course technical apparel would have put a young brand into the most crowded, hardest-to-differentiate part of the market, where the incumbent giants own the fabric technology arms race. Storytelling was the gap, and Students could win storytelling.

The stories it tells are about how golf actually feels. The brand's stated ongoing inspiration is the emotional frustration of the game, how it consumes us, beats us, gets the best of us, and we come back anyway. That translates into collections like the In$titute of Tr@s# Talk%ng capsule, sky-blue "dew sweepers" tees, and a pullover that reads "Please be patient. Golf student in session." It is skate-shop humor pointed at a country club subject, and it works because Huynh means it: this is a designer who describes golf as a love letter or an assignment, and whose handicap journey (lost money at 18, lost more at 7, winning money at 12) is its own piece of brand copy.

The catalog has since matured into polos, sweaters, hats, and pants that work on the course, and the distribution tells you how the fashion world rates it: Students sells through Hypebeast's HBX and Bodega, gets covered by Highsnobiety, and hosted a golf tournament in Paris during Paris Fashion Week. Very few golf brands can walk both fairways.

The Sugarloaf collab and the company Students keeps

In March 2026, Students released Students of Sugarloaf Social Club, a collaboration with Ian Gilley's Sugarloaf Social Club that Boardroom called one of the coolest golf collabs of the year. The pairing made sense on paper, prep nostalgia meeting streetwear edge, and the origin story is very Students: the two brands first connected when Huynh invited Sugarloaf to that Paris Fashion Week tournament years earlier, and the collab idea survived the logistical chaos that killed the original plan.

The collaboration matters beyond the product because of what it confirms about Students' position. The brand is now routinely named in the same breath as Malbon and Metalwood Studio as the core of golf's streetwear-hybrid movement, and it collaborates as a peer with the scene's most credible names. For a brand a few years old, run by a designer who took up golf on doctor's orders, that is a remarkable seat at the table.

Why Students matters

DORMIED tracks 175+ golf brands, and the pattern Students fits is one we have written about before: the culture-first brand that enters golf through identity rather than equipment. Random Golf Club did it through community. Malbon did it through wardrobe. Students does it through voice, the specific, self-deprecating voice of the amateur who loves a game that does not love them back. Its stated mission, making golf more diverse, more inclusive, and less gatekept, is the same current running through the entire new wave.

The difference is pedigree. Huynh is not a golfer who decided to make clothes; he is one of the most influential streetwear designers of his generation who decided to make golf clothes. The jogger is on the short list of garments that actually changed how people dress. Betting that its inventor can do something similar to the golf wardrobe is not a wild bet, and the Index data says the market is starting to price it in.

FAQ

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Track Students' monthly movement on the Students Golf brand page and the full market on the DORMIED Index. Related coverage: Who Owns Malbon Golf? and What Is Random Golf Club?.