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 $455 “Vamps” sneaker looks as if it were imagined for the Pillsbury Doughboy. Its shearling-trimmed tongue is as swollen as a bee-stung hamster. Like a triple-patty steakhouse burger, ERL’s shoes are amusing and a bit awe-inspiring in their cartoonish scale.
For anyone who had a Thrasher subscription in the 2000s, the Vamps will trigger flashbacks to bygone, beefed-up skate shoes like the Osiris D3 and Globe’s RMS3.
These supersized skate shoes were, to Mr. Linnetz, always perfect. (Childhood memories, as ever, loom large.) Decades later, when he decided to create his first sneaker at ERL, he could think of only one way: big.
The response to the Vamps has been fittingly outsize. After their launch this summer, the sneakers came to represent as much as 40 percent of ERL’s sales. (They’ve since sold out in several sizes.) Lil Uzi Vert and Billie Eilish have worn the sneakers. When ERL opened a pop-up store in Venice this summer, “most people came for the shoes,” Mr. Linnetz said. He added that he planned to open a store in South Korea dedicated to Vamps next year.
“They’ve just taken off in an astronomical way,” Mr. Linnetz said.
This is not the first time that designers have tried to couture-ify the skate shoe. In 2018, A$AP Rocky and Under Armour released the SRLo, an overfed sneaker that the rapper admitted was inspired by Osiris’s D3.
A couple years later Lanvin introduced the rotund “Curb” sneakers with rigatoni-size laces. They now retail for $990. Under Virgil Abloh’s tutelage, Louis Vuitton rolled out several skate shoes, but they were practically svelte compared to the Vamps.
These swollen, high-design skate shoes have landed as skateboarding continues to have a great influence on fashion and pop culture. Teens are once again wearing elephantine jeans like characters in the movie “Kids,” and Chappell Roan has appeared onstage in a vintage T-shirt from the skateboarding company, Alien Workshop.
To one extent, as ’90s skate kids have matured into adult consumers with income to burn, designers and vintage dealers are reflecting their youthful obsessions back at them — at a cost.
“Everything’s a remake,” said Joshua Flores, 30, a vintage reseller and collector in Colorado Springs, Colo. A skateboarder since he was a teenager, his shopping habits are guided by nostalgia. Mr. Flores has compiled a collection of over 50 vintage skate tees from brands like Birdhouse, Hook-Ups and Alien Workshop. He is living out his teenage dreams, one roughly $100 T-shirt at a time. “I’m picking stuff up that I wanted to wear when I was 16,” Mr. Flores said.
To that end, while he understands why fashion designers would take on skate shoes, he isn’t interested in spending $455 on them. He would rather buy more tees.
Those central to the fashion world theorized that ERL’s skate inspiration was going over shopper’s heads.
“It has as much to do with skateboarding as Jordan 1 retros have to do with basketball,” said Luke Fracher, owner of a designer consignment store in New York and Los Angeles.
The reason people like inflated sneakers, he said, is because they pair well with oversize pants. “Now that baggy pants are coming into vogue, people are trying to figure out how to wear them without killing and heel biting their $1,000 Acne or Balenciaga jeans into oblivion.”
Kalonji Brown bought the shoes with fit pics, not kickflips, in mind.
“I like the bigger silhouette,” said Mr. Brown, 20, a college student in Miami. The hulking Vamps suited his just as mondo cargo pants.
Could he imagine doing an ollie in them? “I don’t know about skating in” the shoes, Mr. Brown said. After all, once you’ve spent $455 on some haute suede sneakers, who would want to shred them that quickly?
Mr. Fracher noted that whenever he has ERL’s Vamps in stock, they sell quickly. They aren’t for him though. “I’m traumatized because the only shoes my mom would buy me growing up were Airwalk skate shoes for $29.99,” he said.
Mr. Linnetz is already considering how to revamp the Vamps. He’s cooked up a version with spiked studs (just in time for the Warped Tour relaunch) and an all-shearling pair that looks like a haute version of the fuzzy bear slippers you could find at Walmart. Both are currently made to order, though more colorways of the Vamps will be released in December. Mr. Linnetz is also thinking bigger.
“I woke up this morning gasping, like, ‘We need to make the triple puffy version,’” he said. At that scale, they’re less of a skate shoe and more of a physics experiment.
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