Just When You Thought Sneakers Couldn’t Get Any Weirder
The New York Times
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.
