For a show so ostensibly about the future, this ERL IRL debut (last year’s Dior Men resort cameo apart) felt heavily inflected by the past. As he explained before, Eli Russell Linnetz designed this collection to express a narrative of his own invention that was tailor-made to fit at Pitti. So the Palazzo Corsini courtyard was supposed to be the residence of some future ambassador, and we were supposed to be in the year 2176. The fresh faced Linnetz-cast cadre of real-life surfers from his real-life Venice Beach neighborhood had, in that story, come here to catch the waves that break in Tuscany thanks to global warming. Tonight they had crashed the ambassador’s party, bringing souvenirs from their side of the swollen ocean, plus pieces they’d pilfered from closer to here.
So far, so forward looking. But it rapidly became apparent that the Nostradamus conceit of setting this show 150 years ahead also allowed Linnetz to check his Venice-tinted rear view mirror, back to around 50 or 60 years ago: Dogtown days. The Uncle Sam-meets-Slash top hats and ’70s shaped tailored topcoats and shirts worn over starrily-spangled “wetsuits” created an impression in clothing that was only reinforced by the thwup-thwup of Huey rotors and Jim Morrison predicting “The End” on the soundtrack. Not to mention the draft counseling service offered in ERL’s handout 2176-dated newspaper. We were between times, and maybe beyond them.
As Linnetz cheerfully concedes, his experience and instinct both lean towards costume as a form of messaging. Backstage, there was a marvelous quilt made of transparent plastic tape in partnership with the artist Oliver Herring, continuing ERL’s American quilt story, that somehow seemed not to manifest itself on the runway. A strong shouldered officer’s jacket in fishskin-silver lurex was wreathed with abstract embroidered and crystal set regalia. Fleetingly sinister was the character in a vaguely Punisher-skull silver sweater swinging a baseball bat.
Accessories included hyper swollen reimaginings of the Etnies/Emerica/Globe style of early ’90s puffy skate shoes, plus some very Linnetz-specific rubber-framed eyewear that looked more like goggles than sunglasses. The Tom Binns-designed collage chains had enough bling to outshine almost any outfit save for those that they were worn with tonight.
There was an irony embedded in ERL’s first real-world collection being so hyper-unreal; beneath that lurked a point of view about American masculine identities, hang-ups, and brittle wearable projections of power. But as Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” belted out on the sub-woofers and you watched those surfers stroll by, it was as fun to enjoy ERL’s surfaces as it was to attempt to fathom their depths.
