Since launching at Dover Street Market’s stores, ERL has been a secret success—though the designer admits he doesn’t really obsess over SKUs and sell-throughs. “I’m lucky Adrian and the DSM team handle all that for me, so I can just focus on creating something authentic,” he says. “Even the first season, I was going to do a few t-shirts and ended up doing a 60 piece collection. Never once did Adrian tell me to stop. He let me explore.”
The fact that Linnetz is sort of a one-man-band, designing, photographing, and styling each collection himself adds to the intimacy and appeal. In a fashion landscape that is overpopulated by marketing jargon and incessant collaborations, Linnetz comes off as no bullshit. A bit of unfiltered charm.
When he maps out the future of ERL, he tries not to be too prescriptive. “For me it would be expanding the language I’m creating: the American story, the Venice Beach character,” he says. Someday he might want to open a place where his multifaceted interests could convene, a store-music-art space, though it’s hard to picture people hanging out with the languor his work inspires while the pandemic rages on. In the short term, he’s excited to watch his fashion dream become real. “We’re only in the second season and we’ve grown so much,” he says, with the assurance that whatever comes next “will be super organic. I’ll be true to myself and Venice Beach and America.”
His biggest concern might be staving off the fashion machine. Someone who can balance the calculus of celebrity, fashion, art, and music as well as Linnetz can would be highly valuable to the behemoths out there, in the way that fellow multi-hyphenates like Matthew Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Hedi Slimane are. That life might not appeal to him, though. “I feel it’s easy to compare yourself to other people nowadays. For me the challenge is the focus on myself. You have to be kind of self-centered in order to discover what stories you want to tell, but in doing that it’s selfless. You have to sacrifice to work so hard and to understand what you want to say.” Independence was always the American Dream.
The post How Eli Russell Linnetz Built the Ultimate Californian Brand appeared first on Honk Magazine.
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