The disastrous flaw in this ERL collection was starkly obvious: you never let the surfer drive you to the prom. I won’t give away the full plot of this season’s Eli Russell Linnetz Don’t Look Now-influenced lookbook-meets-storyboard, but suffice it to say that the dude was 100 per cent baked.
Linnetz sets up his collections like Ralph Lauren sets up his “rigs,” but with palpable irony and humor. The general context for this one was a Venice Beach high school during the late 1990s, and the designer obviously had great fun relating his characters to costume and then sublimating those into clothes. The care that goes into his storytelling is highly impressive, but just as gripping are the care and details written into the garments.
Linnetz was extra-stoked to be showing sherpa-lined cotton jersey pieces—wave hoodies and a too-long straight-legged track pant—that were LA produced for the first time, “because that’s our artisanship.” A carefully frayed California souvenir shirt and a washed cotton combat chino with slyly referential ERL labelling were both close to ideal examples of their relative forms.
A group of SoCal-punk pieces that were hand fashioned by Linnetz were genius bits of fantasy. His adapted vintage items had almost palpably lived the life of some Black Flag, Dead Kennedy’s loving aesthetic misanthrope. Linnetz bought a hacked Birkin (I think) that had been given the same studded treatment as in the Hermès show, and it must have weighed around 25 pounds. The skater looks—ringer tees and gnarly marly knits—were more attuned to Mr. Bungle and early Faith No More. As an eternal adolescent who is always prone to recreational nostalgia, this outing clicked many personal boxes—but objectively it was also a highly evocative and effective combination of multiple creative skillsets in the pursuit of a banging collection. They just should never have let the surfer drive them to the prom.
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