Dior and ERL took over a few blocks in the heart of Venice Beach for a co-branded runway show. Dior has the resources to create hermetically sealed, cinematic runway universes practically anywhere, like when they built a Looney Tunes desert in Paris—complete with cacti—for the house’s collaboration with Travis Scott last year.
In Venice, Windward Avenue asphalt was painted bright blue. But curious neighbors on nearby rooftops watched SoCal legends like Tony Hawk walk in, and local taquerias and vintage stores framed the runway (or, erm, street). At one point during the show, a water balloon fell from the heavens and splattered a few feet from the VIP section where Jaden Smith and Kevin Abstract were sitting.
The collection is not a collaboration, exactly. Dior Men’s artistic director Kim Jones has done plenty of those, working with artists like Raymond Pettibon, Amaoko Baofo, and Peter Doig to turn their work into patterns and prints for his couture-level garments. He’s also designed collections with the help of streetwear savants like Shawn Stüssy and Travis Scott.
For the spring ’23 capsule, Jones wanted to try a slightly different approach. “I thought, I’d like to give someone that I think is talented an opportunity to go to the archives and work with it,” he said before the show. So he recruited Linnetz to “guest design” the capsule.
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