By Jesse Scott
Roommates turned co-founders Presley Campbell and Alden Kramer are poised to electrify the beaches of Southern California this season with the launch of a romantic and free-spirited collection inspired by Walt Whitman’s poetry. The first summer collection from the eponymous brand, “I Sing the Body Electric” embodies the effortlessly chic and distinctively LA sensibility that has made Campbell & Kramer a favorite among celebrities such as Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, and Tate McRae. It transcends eras. Drawing its title from a poem in Whitman’s 1855 book Leaves of Grass, the collection converses with Lana Del Rey’s nuanced interpretations of California as expressed through her own 2020 poetry anthology Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass.
Del Rey, whose vision of the Golden State oscillates from rose-colored to grit-stained glasses while always remaining infused with nostalgia, famously croons “Whitman is my daddy” and “Marilyn’s my mother” in her track "Body Electric*."* The hazy somewhat psychedelic imagery that both this song and music video evoke is mirrored by the collection’s lookbook. Models lounge on the beach, boulevards, and in perfectly imperfect LA apartments, usually wearing sunglasses, for both faded polaroids and neon-tinted flashes. The expressions say, “cool girl,” while the clothes, in shades of teal, orchid, and glacier, beckon to would-be wearers with the dreamy devil-may-care spirit of the seventies.
A hazy ode to California, where nostalgia, poetry, and effortless cool converge. Courtesy of Campbell & Kramer.
“The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,” Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric reads. “They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, and discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.” This timeless siren call still echoes almost two centuries later, evocative of those formative California summers in which days blur together, each sunset is golden, and the world seems to belong to the young, beautiful, and in love. Campbell & Kramer is made for girls experiencing those summers. Nostalgic in spirit yet modern in form, the collection is expected to be a major hit among A-listers this season.