Late Nine — The Clothes Look Private. The References Never Were.

Late Nine make double-pleat slacks with a full straight leg, ribbed jersey polos with dropped shoulders and oversized buttons, cable knits in burgundy and light blue, a navy instructor’s jacket, suede loop belts and a two-tone rope cap. Shot on plain gray, styled with no logo doing any heavy lifting. The first read is money — the kind that does not announce itself. The reference library underneath says something else entirely. The brand’s own moodboard, per Hypebeast, is The Sopranos and Seinfeld. Co-founder Maxim Lundh grew up copying Sergio Garcia and Jesper Parnevik. Not a country club anywhere in it — New Jersey, Manhattan, and two players a Swedish teenager watched on television.

That teenager’s golf was public by default, and it shows in the clothes. These look like a club because they are copying what the game looked like on a broadcast, and a broadcast belonged to everyone watching it. Put the slacks on at Lions or Hancock and nothing about them is out of place. The construction argues the same way: cotton, wide leg, no elastane, 215g brushed corduroy milled in the UK. In an Austin August that is a functional position rather than a styling one.

It is expensive, and there is no version of this that is not. The Double Pleat Slacks are 3,200 SEK, the Five-pocket Chino 2,700, the Instructors Jacket 4,350 — read from late-nine.com on 21 September 2026 in the brand’s home currency, not converted. Late Nine ship to the US delivered-duty-paid, so nothing lands at customs, but the number is the number. The cheapest way into the look is the Twilight Cap at 500 SEK, which does more work than anything else in the range, or the belts at 1,400. For anyone who already owns the trousers, a plain tee finishes it.

The Story

The name is a time of day. Lundh’s relationship with golf changed around the pandemic — from playing constantly to hunting for any window in the week. “That led to a lot more rounds, either very early in the morning before work or meeting up with a friend for a late nine before sunset.” He was also, by then, dressing for those rounds out of brands with nothing to do with golf, because what he wanted did not exist inside it.

“There was a specific aesthetic we wanted to wear that we felt wasn’t really available,” he told The Old Ghosts. “Coming from fashion and clothing backgrounds ourselves, we all shared an appreciation for craft, quality, and thoughtful design. We couldn’t understand why the same level of attentiveness we expected from the clothes we wore every day wasn’t being translated into golf. So we just took the decision to make it ourselves.”

The period they went back to is narrow and deliberate: the last few years of the nineties and the first of the two-thousands, which Lundh calls “a sort of goldilocks period for golf apparel.” The Ryder Cup is the obsession underneath it — not only the players but the coaches, and the differences between how the American and European sides dressed. The garment copy carries the same specificity: the Orbit Cap cites the two-tone caps on tour in the early 2000s, the Twilight Cap the vintage members caps of the nineties, the Instructors Jacket the jackets worn by golf instructors throughout that decade.

Fit is where the nostalgia turns into an argument. “One of the simplest ways to improve comfort and performance is by giving yourself more room to breathe,” Lundh said. “Which consequently reduces the reliance on excessive elastane. A win-win.” Almost nothing in the range stretches. The trousers are cut full and straight, and the sizing notes tell you the chino runs tighter than the pleated trouser and to size up between.

Materials get named rather than gestured at: ultra-fine merino from the first shearing in the knitwear, Italian four-season wool, a durable textured Italian yarn in the Knit Crepe Polo, LWG-certified Italian cow hide in the belts, flat mother-of-pearl buttons on the plackets. Lundh says fabric has been the hard part. “Pretty much every component, from the fabric to the buttons, has been carefully cherry-picked and sourced by us.”

Stockholm is the other half of it. Asked what he can see from there that people closer to the game miss, Lundh went straight to access. “I’d say the access to great golf, almost all clubs are non-private. Throughout the whole country, we have absolutely beautiful courses, but very few months when we can actually play them. It makes the moment sweeter, but the wait in between can be absolutely dreadful.” A brand built by someone for whom golf was public and seasonal, which is most of the reason it reads correctly on a muni in a city where the season never really stops.

In April the brand stopped being a menswear footnote. Tommy Fleetwood, who had split with Nike at the start of the year and was carrying no apparel deal, played the Masters in Late Nine’s taupe ribbed jersey polo. Lundh on what that meant: “when a player of Tommy’s stature shows up in relaxed silhouettes and chooses to express his own style, I’m sure it inspires every independent brand out there trying to make a difference within the game.” That polo is 1,800 SEK and down to one size of five at the time of writing.

Four Knit Crepe Polo colorways — Forest, Dark Brown, Navy and Ivory — and the long-sleeve Ribbed Jersey Polo in Brown Melange are out of stock at the time of writing, and all five sit in Late Nine’s own Coming Soon collection rather than being retired. Only the Flax Yellow survives on the shelf, down to one size of five.