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 look book meets storyboard, but suffice it to say that the dude was one hundred percent baked.
Linnetz sets up his collections like Ralph Lauren sets up what he calls 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 costumes 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-leg 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 labeling were both close to ideal examples of their relative forms.
A group of SoCal-punk pieces hand-fashioned by Linnetz were genius bits of fantasy. His adapted vintage items had almost palpably lived the life of some Black Flag–, Dead Kennedys–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. For 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 skill sets in the pursuit of a banging collection. They just should never have let the surfer drive them to the prom.
