“Relevance” is the word for Linnetz, too. The 35-year-old is at the forefront of fashion’s preppy revival thanks to the Venice Beach-based ERL, which gives ’90s-kid staples like cargo shorts, striped T-shirts, and enormous skate sneakers a sunfaded, SoCal sheen. (ERL has also recently dipped a flip-flop-clad toe into designs that bring to mind archival Ralph Lauren and Armani garments.)

At ERL, Linnetz has honed a visual identity—wet, hot, American—that’s as distinct and recognizable as Giorgio Armani’s aesthetic was in the ’80s and ’90s. A huge factor in the vintage Armani revival is the enduring swagger of those images, which have become a universal donor of sorts to the rest of men’s fashion. Their chic, rumpled realism have become building blocks of inspiration for generations of photographers, stylists, and designers—including Linnetz, who studied every single Giorgio Armani campaign he could get his hands on to prepare for the shoot.

The night before he flew to Milan for the Armani Archivio launch, I spoke with Linnetz about how he reinterpreted the “scripture” of Armani for today.

GQ: Armani campaigns are so important and formative in menswear in particular. How did you think about casting and shooting your own version of an Armani campaign?

Eli Russell Linnetz: I basically got every single book from every campaign that [Armani has] ever done, which is literally tens of thousands of photos. And they were shot by Peter Lindbergh and some of the greatest photographers of our time. So I thought, how do I create an homage to this person, but also bring something fresh and new to it?

I also think that there’s this remembrance of his work as stoic. And while it is, there’s so much casual laid-backness, and it’s really just about the people and the models wearing it. Mr. Armani’s goal was basically to make timeless things that made everyone look the best they could. So for him, it really was about this casual thing, which is in a lot of my work too. And so we really started focusing on the art of dressing, taking on layers, which is kind of what I’ve been doing in my own work.

I was able to work on the casting for this with local surfers and all the kinds of people that I’m drawn to in my community and in Venice Beach. And I feel like there’s a synergy there, because a lot of the men that were working for Armani were people who could carry the story themselves, and the clothes added to that.