According to Eli Russell Linetz, You Should at Least See This Lookbook GI Joe Or war In a way – there’s a recent Iraq War movie starring Kit Connor, Charles Melton and Joseph Quinn – and consider it more in the spirit of Andy playing with his little green soldier figurines toy StoryOnly with a side of Francis Coppola’s 1979 apocalyptic hallucinatory darkness — and, of course, the intensity of its source material, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel heart of Darkness,
That is to say, see these images less as Linnetz’s glorification of war or as pro-military portraits, and more as his examination of the presence of conflict in our daily lives. Apropos, in addition to war film references, Linnetz also mentioned the film big wednesdayA 1978 bildungsroman that portrays a group of surfers in Malibu, California, and their efforts to avoid the Vietnam War draft, the events of which push them into adulthood.
Linnetz titled this resort delivery surplus in reference to surplus stores as a constant presence in “a deep corner of the American consciousness”. (For those not born and raised in the US, a surplus store is a retail store of excess gear, military or otherwise; they have both the allure of places selling lots of stuff for cheap and the heaviness of haunted objects and the ephemerality of past lives.) Linetz repurposed the surplus stock he said he’d been collecting for years, and stocked it with his more fantastic interpretations. Patch-worked parkas and jackets with ERL camouflage separates, soft Donegal sweaters, and cool-looking cargoes in brilliantly dyed fabrics were in the mix.
The imagery of war is heavy and the conversation around it, especially in America, known around the world for its wariness, is nuanced and complex. But this need not always be so if we allow our moral conscience to lead us north. Linnetz said he is far removed from news cycles and trending topics, and he sees ERL as a project that explores American culture from both a human and sartorial perspective. With ERL, he has made his mark as one of the truest believers in American fashion’s vernacular language and presence in the global fabric of sportswear. And by making his assortment narrative-first, often evoking nostalgia by telling stories of skaters or prom-goers or bike riders, he’s managed to make those narratives a selling point. The caveat this time is that it’s a complicated moment for camouflage and military motifs. Still, there’s no debating that Linnetz’s timing is often spot-on when it comes to his cultural commentary.
