Fashion

How Eli Russell Linnetz Built the Ultimate Californian Brand

You might know Eli Russell Linnetz’s film, photography, and stage design, but his fashion company, ERL, is just as exciting. Based in Venice Beach and backed by Dover Street Market Paris, the brand has all the makings of a fashion world…

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.

Photo: Eli Russell Linnetz

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.

Photo: Eli Russell Linnetz

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Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

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Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

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