Eli Russell Linnetz just might be the most influential fashion designer you don’t know yet. If you aren’t familiar with his clothing brand, ERL, you certainly know his work. As an artist, photographer, director, and stage designer he has produced a floating stage for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo tour, directed several of the rapper’s music videos, and photographed the likes of Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, and Hailey Bieber. The impact of his lo-fi, high-emotion imagery can be felt across the entertainment industry, coloring the aesthetics of music videos, celebrity photography, and a generation of selfie takers. But it’s his clothes that have the potential to push Linnetz to the next level. A video or concert or photograph is ephemeral: Watch it, see it, mimic it, move on. Linnetz’s garments have an intimacy that could connect him to his near-200K Instagram followers in a new, physical way.
For someone who has worked in the highest rungs of the Californian clout trade, Linnetz was startlingly warm and honest when we spoke over the phone in the hazy days of late summer. The same can be said of his simple, sensual takes on the most all-American staples. Rugby shirts, sports jerseys, Farrah Fawcett jean shorts, and long johns are the building blocks of his spring 2021 collection, which he photographed on surfers scouted around Venice Beach. It’s a friendly, unpretentious American dream, but not an overly idealistic one. His wholesome jocks come off slightly frayed at the edges, sun-bleached in pastel corals, lime greens, and lilacs with shaggy shearling boots on their feet.
Maybe that’s a result of Linnetz’s own experience. He says that to really explore his interest in fashion, he had to put the chaos of the celebrity industry aside for a while. “If I’m really going to do this, I’m going to need to find some peace and understanding,” he recalled. “I was having so much anxiety that would keep me up at night when I first put a pause on working with celebrities and focused on doing the collection. But I said [to myself ]: I’m not going to think about anything other than creating peace and harmony, really trying to say something honest and listening to myself. That calmness is something super new for me; if my early work is so aggressive, I feel it’s because there was so much pressure and stress to create something for so many people. I feel like the clothing line I created for myself is an escape.”
Linnetz’s longing for escape is universal, but the collection is deeply personal. “I don’t really wear any clothes,” he says. “I’m usually just in my boxers and barefoot, which totally informs my approach to life and my collections, which is just something easy.” As a lifelong Venice Beach resident, growing up Linnetz did the things a California kid does: surfing, sports, hanging out on the fringes of Hollywood culture. “My parents gave me so much creative freedom to express myself, running around naked; [it was a] pretty artsy upbringing,” he says of his graphic designer mother and lawyer dad. “Venice is super laid-back, and I feel like that really influenced a lot of what I do.” Today, he lives and works in neighboring houses, still chilling in the same streets he was raised on.
He organically made his way through the ranks of Californian creatives, studying screenwriting and designing theater costumes at the University of Southern California. In 2016, he directed Kanye West’s “Fade” video, starring Teyona Taylor. By the following year, he was photographing a campaign for Comme des Garçons perfumes. That’s where he met Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, the owner of the creative agency House + Holme, who is something of Linnetz’s fairy godmother. She was the first to see his fashion potential, and introduced him to Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme des Garçons International and Dover Street Market International. Together, they hatched the plan to launch the ERL collection with Dover Street Market Paris, the company’s investment and support arm, which also backs Vaquera, Youths in Balaclava, and Honey Fucking Dijon.
“ERL might seem like a Venice Beach, surf inspired, gender-neutral collection,” Cooke Newhouse says. “But it is much weirder than that, culminating from all of Eli’s diverse interests and brilliant creative achievements. Lifestyle is usually a naff word to me, as it is always associated with convention, but Eli has created more of a cultural potpourri collection with no constraints, no limits, no commercial do’s and don’ts—just to make things that he and his friends find cool to wear, and I love it.”
Joffe echoes the sentiment. “He himself is outside the norm: His way of thinking, his perceptions, the way he deals with information, his interactions with people are all unique,” says Joffe. “His sense of humor is upside-down, which I love. He can drive you crazy, be really annoying and truly inspiring all at once. It’s inevitable, therefore, that his work is creative, original, and exciting.”
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.
