Metalwood Studio Is Los Angeles Golf's Nostalgia Machine

Walk into Metalwood Studio on La Brea and the usual line between golf shop and fashion store gets blurry. New house-label clothing shares space with old blades and oddball woods. There is a putting surface, a club-repair bench and equipment that looks as if it came from the bag room of a 1997 mini-tour event. The address is in central Los Angeles, but the atmosphere pulls from several versions of the city at once: municipal golf, skateboarding, vintage collecting and independent retail.

That mixture is the point. Founder Cole Young did not build Metalwood to make traditional golf clothes slightly cooler. He built a golf and lifestyle label around an era the sport had already discarded, then let Los Angeles teach him how far that idea could travel.

From Carlsbad junior golf to La Brea

Young grew up in Carlsbad and came to Los Angeles in 2012 to play Division I golf at Loyola Marymount University. His LMU roster lists Business Marketing as his major, an unusually tidy preview of what followed. In interviews, he has described becoming as interested in apparel and the creative industries around LA as he was in the competitive game.

After college, Young worked for nearly four years across wholesale, marketing and brand work at Malbon Golf. He was learning inside one of the labels already widening golf's cultural frame. Metalwood began on the side as an Instagram moodboard: old tour photographs, enormous pleated trousers, forgotten equipment and the visual debris of golf's late-1990s technology boom.

The chronology can be confusing because the idea, company and shop arrived at different moments. The moodboard was underway by 2019; multiple profiles date Metalwood's commercial launch to 2020; and Young moved the business into its La Brea storefront in early 2022. That sequence matters. The store was the physical expression of a point of view Metalwood had already spent years refining online.

The nostalgic wormhole

Metalwood's own about page calls the brand an ode to golf in the 1990s and early 2000s, when persimmon and balata were giving way to louder, faster equipment while tour clothing somehow became baggier and less athletic. The reference is specific enough to escape generic retro styling. Its graphics, silhouettes and product names reward people who remember the era, but they do not require that knowledge to work.

The vintage clubs are more than set dressing. Young has said he enjoys older equipment for its feel, appearance and individuality even when it gives up something to modern technology. A mismatched bag can tell a story in a way a fitted set cannot. Metalwood carries founder-selected clubs and offers repair and customization, turning collecting into a practical invitation: try the strange putter, reshaft the old iron, make golf slightly less optimized and perhaps more fun.

That outlook fits Los Angeles public golf. Roosevelt, Los Feliz, Rancho Park and Penmar bring together serious players, beginners, musicians, designers and skaters without asking them to dress or behave as a single tribe. Our guide to the best municipal golf courses in Los Angeles shows the network that makes this possible. Metalwood did not invent that culture, but it gave one corner of it a retail address.

A local shop with legacy-brand reach

Metalwood's collaborations trace how quickly that address expanded. Early projects with Jones and Los Angeles eyewear maker Garrett Leight established the design language. Three FootJoy releases reframed familiar golf shoes. A 2024 Maxfli collection drew directly from vintage advertisements and the company's archives, using an old performance name as material rather than merely placing two logos together.

In February 2026, adidas and Metalwood released their first full golf capsule, a six-piece range that mixed Y2K football, skate and golf references. In August, Metalwood and G.H.BASS revived the Sportocasin, an archival golf-adjacent shoe. The partners are getting larger, but the method remains consistent: find a piece of sportswear history with some unresolved personality and translate it for the present.

Calling all of this streetwear is too narrow. Metalwood uses scarcity, graphics and collaborations in ways familiar to streetwear, but its center of gravity is still golf: equipment knowledge, old advertising, course rituals and the peculiar taste of people who care about a specific iron from a specific year. The joke works because the homework is real.

What Metalwood is now

As of September 1, 2026, Metalwood's store page lists 128 S La Brea Avenue as its Los Angeles home. The current online assortment runs from polos, trousers and outerwear to hats, socks, gloves, bags, belts, shoes and small accessories, while its stockist page shows distribution well beyond California. Inventory changes quickly, so the shop is more useful as a place to understand the brand than as a promise that a particular drop will be waiting.

The deeper achievement is that Metalwood made nostalgia productive. It did not recreate a country-club pro shop from 1999. It extracted the oversized shapes, equipment curiosity and slightly awkward confidence of that period, then rebuilt them inside contemporary Los Angeles. The result feels local even when an adidas logo enters the frame.

If you are exploring that scene in person, start with our guide to the best golf stores in Los Angeles. Metalwood belongs on the list because it sells more than things: it makes a convincing case that golf's discarded past can still produce a new way into the game.

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