IT IS probably a mistake, but half an hour or so after meeting Johan Lindeberg for the first time, I show him some photographs taken of me playing golf as a teenager in the late 1980s. There are about seven in all, each showcasing an outfit billowy and shapeless enough to make Tiger Woods’s trademark roomy trousers resemble the get-up of an Olympic cyclist, and, as the Swedish clothing designer passes his critical glance over them, he begins to shake his head.

“This is what I’m talking about, you see,” he says, dismissively flicking across the table towards me a shot showcasing a look best described as “Strolling Reject Shop” that my Mum had clearly hoped I would grow into. “There is an . . . attempt at colour co-ordination. But look at the amount of material on that sleeve. How is this going to help your game?”

Lindeberg is a rarity — a golf clothing designer who not only muses over what looks best on the course, but what will help a player to perform to his optimum potential. He describes himself as “a living legend” and “the only golf clothing designer who truly loves golf”. A friend who has met him cited the experience as “more awe-inspiring than meeting Seve”.

While these might be bold statements, there is no doubt that, over the past few years, Lindeberg has almost single-handedly changed the way professional golfers dress. He also has a personality that can fill a room with little effort.

In the mid-1990s, Lindeberg left his post at Diesel, the denim-orientated label , and set up on his own under an abbreviation of his own name, J Lindeberg. Setting out on his own “private war” — what he calls “a relentless drive to modernise golf” — his self-appointed first task was to dress Jesper Parnevik, his countryman and a player who, at the time, was making an ultimately career-transforming shift from the European Tour to its more lucrative American equivalent. He had seen Parnevik contending for the Open Championship at Turnberry in 1994 and had noticed that, despite not having a bit of spare flesh on him, he looked “like a sack of potatoes”.

To remedy this, Lindeberg put him in an upturned baseball cap, tight — frequently extrovertly patterned — trousers and Seventies-style stiff collar shirts. Quickly, derisive comments from the golfing establishment followed.

Now, almost a decade later, with Parnevik accepted as a style icon, just about every other player on tour attempting to emulate him and J Lindeberg established as the label of choice for the new golfing generation, Lindeberg sits back, looking satisfied. “Now everyone is making J Lindeberg-style clothes — Burberry, Nike, adidas, but we were the original,” he says. “A few years ago, Adam Scott was wearing our clothes, but he stopped because he couldn’t take the ribbing he used to get from other players on tour, like Darren Clarke. Now he is wearing bright trousers, with that retro look. And Darren Clarke? He is wearing them, too.”

These days, Lindeberg — who also specialises in ski wear — is careful about the professionals he picks to promote his label, explaining that they must embody a J Lindeberg lifestyle “off the course as well as on it”. A cursory look through his latest catalogue shows that, where most pro golfers like fast cars and fishing, J Lindeberg pros list their hobbies as “meditation”, “magic” and “yoga”.

Joining the likes of Parnevik, Aaron Baddeley, Fredrik Jacobson and Hank Kuehne, his latest signing is James Heath, the young British professional and record-breaking winner of last year’s Lytham Trophy, the amateur strokeplay tournament that in Walker Cup years serves as a form guide to the biennial event against the United States. In one promo shot that Lindeberg shows me, Heath appears to be wearing jeans..

Jeans? On a golf course? Really? “Oh, no,” Lindeberg says. “That’s not golf wear he’s modelling in that shot. I don’t want to bring denim to the golf course because I respect the game’s history.”

J Lindeberg, he says, is really a traditional label. “Until 1987, golfers were still wearing some quite good clothes with a good fit. Then that shapeless thing came in and became what people thought of as ‘the golf look’. I wanted to bring golf back to what it was, but into the modern era, too, and with bright colours because they look good against the grass.” Originally, he says, he would get his inspiration from the endless piles of vintage golf magazines he would buy on his travels in the United States. These days, he will spend 20 hours a week watching televised golf, rewinding Kuehne’s backswing and watching it in slow motion, noticing something he can change in the cut of a sleeve to allow the longest hitter on tour to hit it even farther. But most of the time, Lindeberg will feel at his most inspired after the 2½ hours a day he spends meditating.

He still has countless goals in golf wear — he believes that he could do marvellous things for “a naturally stylish guy like Phil Mickelson”, hankers to get Kenny Perry out of his sweaty, landscaped shirts and would like to get Woods to swap his baggy grey slacks for some red ones that show off his muscle tone — but his attentions, now, are also turning to that other long-regressed golfing area: the clubhouse.

“The clothes and cars you see around golf clubs are now very well-designed,” Lindeberg says, “yet the buildings themselves are so suffocating.”

His dream is to create a “truly modern club environment”. As he tells me this, his shoulders seem to broaden. “I’m accepted on tour now,” he says. “The famous guys — Tiger and everyone — come up to me and say hello. I’m not just some guy hanging around.”

• Johan Lindeberg will be appearing at the London Golf Show at the ExCel Centre, April 21-24.