Elwood and Birdwell are teaming up on a capsule collection rooted in the look and feel of Southern California summers, drawing on decades of surf history to shape the line.
The collaboration launches Friday exclusively at elwoodclothing.com and birdwell.com, bringing together Elwood’s vintage-leaning approach to everyday dressing with Birdwell’s six-decade run as a Southern California surf staple. The collection includes washed T-shirts, striped zip hoodies, camo shorts, swim trunks, canvas totes, straw hats and accessories.
For Elwood co-owners Justin Saul and Jackson Wirht, the project traces back further than current surf revivalism. “The intention is to capture the feeling of growing up in Southern California,” they told WWD, pointing to the arc from surf culture’s 1960s emergence through its evolution in the ’90s. That decade in particular shaped the collection’s mood — not through research, but memory. The pair described childhood bedrooms covered in surf magazine cutouts and boards decorated with stickers in imitation of pro riders, calling the capsule a nod to that same impulse to live inside surf culture even when not in the water.
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Birdwell CEO Eric Crane said the brand’s archive offered an obvious starting point once the collaboration’s direction was set. The team pulled the 312 long board short and built around it, with Crane noting it was “the perfect silhouette” for tapping into the renewed interest in ’90s-era beachwear, citing the camo-printed long version as a faithful, if updated, reintroduction of a classic style.
Materials played as large a role as silhouette in shaping the line. Elwood worked in terry, slub cotton and French terry, while Birdwell leaned on its in-house Surfnyl nylon — used across the board shorts and, notably, on a baseball cap built on what Crane described as Elwood’s well-regarded fit.
Neither side framed the project as a reinvention. Saul and Wirht said the approach was largely about restraint: “We don’t need to reinvent anything here,” they said, arguing that surf staples have already proven their staying power and simply needed room to exist in a new context. Crane offered a similar read, describing the collection as both new and familiar — the kind of pieces that could believably have been thrifted from a Venice Beach shop, even as fabrications like Terry and slub cotton give them a softer, more contemporary hand.
The two companies frame the partnership as a meeting point rather than a stylistic overhaul: Elwood’s relaxed, sun-faded sensibility applied to Birdwell’s surf-specific archive, with Crane noting that Birdwell’s own design history gave Elwood “a fresh perspective” to work from while keeping the output recognizably tied to the brand’s roots.
