Kendrick Lamar’s ‘GNX’ Belt Is an Homage to Los Angeles

“The people that get it, get it,” Linnetz says, who now has a few versions of his pin belts for sale and has seen interest from the sorts of “art-world, art-collector people” who attended Linnetz’s show at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles this summer. It makes sense, he adds, since “the belts that I make are very much like little mini sculptures.”

“It’s cool when you’re just in your bubble creating something and you’re not even making it for anyone, you’re just kind of creating art,” he adds, “and then people like Pharrell or Rihanna or Kendrick [who] are poets and storytellers and artists can kind of cut through the noise and connect with something.”

A first-edition prototype for Lamar’s pin belt, as seen on a model.

Courtesy of ERL

To honor Lamar’s request, Linnetz—who grew up in Venice Beach and runs his namesake brand from LA—scoured his collection of local bric-a-brac. “I collect so many antiques and odds and ends that I had just the right stuff to put together to make him a special one with all pins from Los Angeles and California,” the designer says. (Linnetz’s archive also produced the vintage quilt A$AP Rocky wore to the 2021 Met Gala.) Basing his design off that first-edition prototype, the final buckle was a thematic pastiche for his and Lamar’s shared hometown featuring palm trees, Olympic rings, and Hollywood ephemera—including a few very timely nods to The Wizard of Oz and its proverbial Emerald City.

Indeed, Linnetz said his personal favorite pin on the custom buckle is “a thousand percent the little dog.”

“It’s so funny because it has such a specific attitude from far away on the album cover that it looks super serious and badass,” the designer added with a laugh. “And then when you actually look at it close up it’s like the most ridiculous collection of, like, a little Toto dog in Wizard of Oz.”