Hey! Ho! Happy Socks Drops Ramones Tribute
Linda Ramone’s one-of-a-kind home inspired this colorful-cool sock range.
Linda Ramone’s Sherman Oaks bungalow is a temple of technicolor, with its Seussian decor and Hollywood memorabilia leaving no square inch unpigmented. While she’s now lived there for twice as long as she shared it with late husband Johnny Ramone—head honcho of the Ramones, Ur-band of American punk rock—the house also stands as a living vigil, with Linda’s maximal decorative gestures punctuated by Johnny’s jet-black, mop-haired aura of cool.
The living room throws Johnny and Linda’s complementary dynamic into high relief. There you’ll find relics like a decommissioned figure from “It’s a Small World After All” and a gilded birdcage gifted by childhood friend Anna Sui, as well as portraits of Johnny by everyone from Shepard Fairey to Dee Dee Ramone. So it’s no wonder that the room served as a major inspiration in Linda’s latest homage to her and Johnny’s decades-long partnership: a capsule collection with Swedish brand Happy Socks.
Besides taking direct visual cues from Linda’s living room—namely a floor-to-ceiling mural of multicolor clouds and a painting of the couple by artist Kelly Tunstall—the collection embodies the punk doyenne’s high-stimulation fashion ethos: “I love getting dressed up everyday; it would be boring not to, for me,” she tells us at her home. “I am not saying everyone has to—people should do whatever makes them happy. For me, dressing up everyday is what makes me happy.”
Ramone, a Queens native, began cultivating a life in color as New York’s glitter-rock scene was yielding to punk rock’s dominant blacks and metallics. “I started going into the city at 15 or 16; [I’d seen] a photo of the New York Dolls, and I was like okay, that’s it! But this was already toward the end of glitter-rock,” she recalls. “All of a sudden, [it was all about] CBGB.” The seminal club did attract other color lovers, many of whom became Ramone’s lifelong pals, like Anna Sui (“I’ve known Anna since we were all going to CBGB—she’d come to my house when I still lived at home,” says Ramone) and Blondie, who also keep watch in the Ramones Ranch living room, in a photo shot by guitarist Chris Stein.
Despite the black-and-white colorways that define still-ubiquitous Ramones band merch, Linda says Johnny was no stranger to pops of visual flair. “Was he colorful? No, he wore jeans and a leather jacket all the time, so how colorful could you be?” she admits. “But, Johnny always wore pink T-shirts!” Indeed, judging by Johnny’s taste in accessories, the new Happy Socks collab would surely have had a place in his dresser drawer: “He wore yellow socks and pink socks! But it was different back then though—you didn’t have Happy Socks,” says Ramone. “You were lucky if you could find one pair of red socks!”
See Linda Ramone rocking the Happy Socks collab at home below.