Fashion
Just When You Thought Sneakers Couldn’t Get Any Weirder
Puffy, pricey, and strangely perfect for the moment, the $455 ERLs are billed as skateboard shoes — but maybe don’t try to skate in them.
Eli Russell Linnetz grew up skateboarding. Was he good at it? Perhaps it’s better not to ask.
“I wasn’t as good as everyone else,” said Mr. Linnetz, 33, the sprightly designer behind the Southern California fashion brand ERL. “But I did it.”
If he couldn’t kickflip, it didn’t hamper Mr. Linnetz’s ability to create the paunchiest, most ingenuous, “skate shoe” in recent memory.
ERL’s $455 “Vamps” sneaker looks as if it were imagined for the Pillsbury Doughboy. Its shearling-trimmed tongue is as swollen as a bee-stung hamster.Like a triple-patty steakhouse burger, ERL’s shoes are amusing and a bit awe-inspiring in their cartoonish scale.
For anyone who had a Thrasher subscription in the 2000s, the Vamps will trigger flashbacks to bygone, beefed-up skate shoes like the Osiris D3 and Globe’s RMS3.
These supersized skate shoes were, to Mr. Linnetz, always perfect. (Childhood memories, as ever, loom large.) Decades later, when he decided to create his first sneaker at ERL, he could think of only one way: big.
The response to the Vamps has been fittingly outsize. After their launch this summer, the sneakers came to represent as much as 40 percent of ERL’s sales. (They’ve since sold out in several sizes.) Lil Uzi Vert and Billie Eilish have worn the sneakers. When ERL opened a pop-up store in Venice this summer, “most people came for the shoes,” Mr. Linnetz said. He added that he planned to open a store in South Korea dedicated to Vamps next year.
