Nick Holiday Builds a Streetwear World Inspired by Black Ops Royale

A line wrapped around the block on Melrose Avenue the day Nick Holiday opened his doors to the public. That detail alone tells you something about how well designer Nick Lenzini, who goes by Nick Holiday, understood the assignment when Call of Duty came calling.

The collaboration between Holiday, the LA-based alternative streetwear label Lenzini founded in 2017, and Call of Duty produced a limited Black Ops Royale-inspired capsule collection timed to the March 12 Warzone launch of the Black Ops Royale mode, according to Dexerto. The collection spans tactical jackets, hoodies, and accessories built to reflect the mode's drop-in, scavenging, and gear-driven gameplay. But the clothes were almost secondary to what Lenzini built around them.

From Performance Art to a Pop-Up World

Before Holiday was a streetwear brand, Lenzini was doing performance art installations that pushed endurance and immersion: being blindfolded for eight hours, sitting in a box for ten hours. That practice shaped everything about how he approaches a creative space. A contact at CAA noticed those installations and brought Holiday to Call of Duty's attention at exactly the right moment.

"I always approach projects with a mindset of creating a world within the space that translates not just in person but also online," Lenzini told Bleeding Cool. "We've been doing that for years and getting better every year. My friend at CAA noticed this, and Call of Duty was looking for someone to bring a new light to their world. Through my experience and discussions with them, they trusted that I could deliver a cool collection and create something tangible that people can leave with, like an ID card."

That philosophy turned the Holiday Store at 8016 Melrose Ave in Los Angeles into something closer to a game level than a retail floor. The collection and the store build were designed together, each reinforcing the other, with the physical space structured to mirror the scavenging logic of Black Ops Royale itself.

Inside the Melrose Takeover

The Friends and Family preview ran on March 13 from 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM, functioning as a test run for the full experience. Lenzini attended masked, as did his staff. That decision was intentional and central to the concept: everyone in the space stayed in character, no one breaking the fiction of the world they had built.

The public takeover opened the following day and, per Dexerto, runs through March 29. The crowd response was immediate. "Day one, we had a line around the corner, which was awesome and fun," Lenzini said in the Bleeding Cool interview. "Yesterday was the public launch, with people lined up and experiencing everything we built."

The installation details were deliberate and specific. Mannequins hung from the ceiling. Attendees moved through the space by finding an item, receiving an ID card, and reporting to a team member, at which point they were issued a custom ID card to take home. The scavenge-to-reward loop was a direct echo of how Black Ops Royale plays in Warzone, translated into physical retail.

"I love the mannequins hanging from the ceiling; it was super," Lenzini said. "Everyone enjoyed the details we put into everything. We created something that felt like it existed in the game yet in our vein. Everyone was in character, including myself, wearing masks so no one could recognize us. You'd find an item, get an ID card, and report to our team, while waiting, you'd receive a custom ID card. It was fun seeing people experience it fully. It's important now, especially with everyone on their phones."

That last line is worth sitting with. Lenzini is acutely aware that an in-person activation in 2026 has to compete with everything on a screen. The answer, in his view, is not to fight the phone but to give people something physical and tactile that demands presence.

The Brand Behind the Collab

Holiday's path to a Call of Duty partnership runs through a specific corner of LA culture. Lenzini previously founded a brand called Stay Broke and designed for Brockhampton before launching Holiday in 2017, according to Rapindustry and Dexerto. The brand built its early reputation through music and streetwear culture, earning wider attention with a NY/LA hat that stitched a Yankees logo and a Dodgers logo together on a single cap, a piece that landed perfectly for anyone living between both coasts or loyal to both cities.

That background in music-adjacent streetwear, where the product has to carry cultural weight beyond its fabrication, maps directly onto what a gaming collab demands. The press release framing for the collection captures the target exactly: "made for gamers by gamers," built for players "who know the rush of the circle closing, the last squad standing, and the clutch comms that turn chaos into victory." The collection is positioned not as licensed merch but as a uniform for people who actually play, described officially as "a uniform for the modern operator."

The Collection Itself

The capsule is limited and Black Ops Royale-specific, with Dexerto noting tactical jackets, hoodies, and accessories as the core product categories. Each piece is designed to carry the aesthetic of scavenging and survival gameplay into everyday wear, blending what the press materials call "tactical intensity with everyday style." There are no announced pricing details or production run numbers in the available information, which is consistent with how Holiday has historically treated drops: scarcity is part of the language.

The collection draws a direct throughline between what happens when you drop into a Warzone match with no gear and start building your loadout from the ground up, and what it means to wear something that signals you understand that experience. It is gear-coded streetwear, aimed at players who see the operator aesthetic as genuinely theirs.

How to Get It

The physical experience at Holiday Store on Melrose runs through March 29. The online drop landed on March 20 on Holiday's website, opening the collection to anyone outside Los Angeles who missed the store activation. Given today's date, the online drop has already gone live, making Holiday's site the primary access point for the collection at this stage.

The Melrose store itself remains open for the takeover through the end of the month for anyone in the LA area who wants the full installation experience, the mannequins, the ID card mechanic, and the in-character staff included.

Lenzini built a world inside a retail space, and Call of Duty let him. The result is one of the more genuinely immersive brand activations the game has produced, rooted not in corporate spectacle but in a designer's decade-long practice of turning a room into somewhere worth staying.