R13 (Q8966)
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R13 is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | R13 |
R13 is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“The base of R13 is denim, jeans, but maybe I’ll become a dress designer,” pondered Chris Leba at his SoHo showroom, clutching a floral frock from his pre-fall collection. Except it wasn’t your regular sun dress—it was made with two layers, one plain and wooly and the other silky and sheer, printed with a floral Leba described as “pretty but a little dark.” It was somewhat Tim Burton-esque, and certainly grungy. “I mean, that’s my roots, right? the designer quipped.These florals carried over in multiple color-ways on a variety of dress silhouettes that were more compelling the weirder they got, like an ochre velvet A-line slip and a muddy wallpaper-like cocooning shirtdress that happened to reverse into one of Leba’s signature plaids. This rather practical—and new for R13—concept of offering double-faced styles was one of the designer’s key ideas here. Another standout here was an oversized twill camel coat that was faced with another plaid, this one more classic. Its seams and hems were all left undone, adding to its punky appeal. “It’s really always about the fabrics,” said Leba, explaining that the idea of having these reversible styles came from finding just the right materials and designing around them.To Leba’s credit, it’s really not all about the fabrics, but about knowing what to do with them. For instance, he took an utterly strange hole-y silk with a mesh backing and turned it into a cool shirtdress and an even better handkerchief skirt, and tailored a soft blazer out of a very supple knit with its hems joining in the front in a casual twist. This hem idea came up once more in a sweater and evolved into the way Leba cropped some denim shirts and cardigans by making them slimmer at the waist so they catch on the body and curl up. Also clever was the way he rounded the hems so the plackets loop completely around the body as opposed to stopping at the bottom.About those roots Leba was discussing, this season he looked into his own archive to unearth the shaggy black shearling/motorcycle jacket hybrid that opens this lookbook. He changed the fit, he said, to make it more relevant for today, but the essence is the same. He iterated its material-blocking throughout a range of truly special outerwear styles. “I’m into staying with things now as opposed to chasing the new,” he said. He was talking about carrying over some of his best-sellers, like those roomy plaid shirts and distressed knits you’ve seen on everyone from Charli XCX to Travis Kelce.
It’s this spirit that makes Leba one of New York fashion’s truest grunge proponents. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
5 December 2024
Stepping into Chris Leba’s R13 showroom in SoHo was the sensory equivalent of walking past a flower shop in the middle of Midtown Manhattan—a splash of color and a whiff of freshness, somewhat unexpected but certainly appreciated.“The trick is to find how to do color and still look like R13, that’s my whole thing,” said Leba. And how exactly did he do it? “If you’re wearing something that’s sort of sweet, then you need to find some edge to add to it,” he said. Seems simple enough, but it was really Leba’s perennially cool touch that took this idea from theory to practice seamlessly.Take a primary red sequin jacket or a pair of pink floral cargos. Or a powder blue canvas jacket or sweet pair of flowery bloomers. None of these sound like R13, nor do they sound remotelycool. Trendy? Sure! Punk? Not quite. Except that here, Leba made his sequin blazer oversized and razor sharp, and rolled up its sleeves and paired it with a tiny pair of bloomers (yes, they’re a thing this season already) in a gray Prince of Wales check suiting fabric. The floral cargos were cut to hang off the body with a looseness that gave them a defiant, louche touch, and the canvas jacket was cropped just far enough up the abdomen that, when styled with a matching studded belt hanging off some Bermuda shorts, it evoked a sort of late ’80s kind of grunginess. As for those cutesy blossoming bloomers, they were worn with a belt almost as wide as the shorts themselves and a black leather T-shirt, which says it all.Across the board, Leba loosened up his proportions even more than usual this season, to positive effect. Particularly fresh was the way he dropped the crotches of his shorts and trousers, sometimes adding gussets in the same place to create even more space between the clothes and the body. There was an androgyny to these styles that carried a certain sultriness: “I want it to be sexy but not necessarily revealing,” Leba said. Mission accomplished.
9 September 2024
Around a year ago, Chris Leba mentioned that K-pop artists had developed an affinity for his work at R13. He found out about it on TikTok, as it often goes these days, when a TikToker was reporting on what these musical idols were wearing. When asked if the discovery had influenced his work then, Leba answered no; the collection was already finished by the time he noticed. Leba is not one to bend the knee to trends, after all.Fast-forward to this year’s resort preview, where Leba mentioned that his algorithm has been serving him an abundance of Korean influencers. He said he’s fascinated by one of the things they wear, leg warmers, and so he made a few pairs in plushy knits to style under over-the-knee shorts and over his signature bulky shoes. Did he design for the K-poppers? Not particularly. He didn’tonlyspend time on TikTok this year. What’s fun about listening to Leba run through a rack of clothing is that he loves to cite his references, no matter how disparate or seemingly random they may be.He recently watchedDune: Part Two, hence the ample sandworm-ish funnel necklines on sweatshirts and the wide fold-over collars on his outerwear and knitwear. Another thing the algorithm served him were images of Sigourney Weaver in the firstAlienmovie. “She wore the coolest sweatpants,” he said, and so he remade them as slouchy low-rise Bermuda shorts and pants. Leba has a long-held affinity for military design details and recently purchased an old Chinese flare parachute on eBay. Its zigzag stitching and seam-taping details were applied to everything from a pair of billowing silky parachute pants to cargos, shrunken flight jackets, and oversized jacket liners worn as coats.Leba’s organizing principle remains his day-one R13 philosophy. The just-a-little-bit-off familiarity of his clothes is why they turn up on celebrities of all stripes: J.Lo and Sofia Richie Grainge in oversized overalls, Dua Lipa in a plaid wrap skirt and chunky boots, Travis Kelce in a sun-blasted rainbow plaid shirt at Coachella. “I still want you to look at it and say, ‘Oh, okay, that’s a motorcycle jacket,’” he said of the best piece in this lineup, a cropped black leather moto jacket with zippered shawl lapels in lieu of a regular double-breasted cut. “You still need to know exactly what it is—if you can’t tell, it’s no good.”
5 June 2024
“You know the band Aerosmith?” began R13’s Chris Leba at a showroom appointment. “That first song they wrote, I remember Steven Tyler saying that he was in an apartment in Boston, dirt poor with all of his bandmates, and they wrote that song,” he continued. “It’s impossible for him to write that song again because he’s no longer that person, there’s such a purity in that.”Leba has been reflecting on the state of his own creativity. The introspection started when he began to readThe Creative Act: A Way of Beingby the famed American record producer Rick Rubin. A chapter on rules, said Leba, made him consider the prescriptions he’s applied to his own work. “In this company we have very strict design codes,” Leba explained, “and what Rubin was saying is that rules in themself are a form of limitations, and that we limit ourselves with the rules we have set in place.”It sounds oxymoronic to think that Leba and R13, a designer and label defined by their punk mentality and aesthetic, could have any rules. But at the center of a punk ethos is authenticity, and making sure things feel real is at the core of Leba’s work. In fashion, authenticity is a limitation. For a motorcycle jacket to feel authentic, it should follow certain aesthetic codes. Leba has built R13 based on the idea that he can twist classics just enough to make them cool, but not to the point where they become unfamiliar. For fall, he did away with his attachment to this rulebook.A flight jacket was cut in military green and finished with classic enamel hardware, but its sleeve shape was exaggerated and hybridized with a knit gusset. Aviator bombers were cut in leather and lined with sherpa, but their shoulders were expanded and their waists cropped and cinched. What would be a classic leather coat was actually made in wool tolooklike well-loved denim (“it’s crazy expensive, like all cool things”), and chunky cable knit sweaters were overprinted with black to achieve a rubbery, leather-like texture from the exterior. Even more compelling, however, were Leba’s riffs of his own R13 classics. His straight leg jeans were flocked to offer a velvety texture, his go-to velvet suit was cut in a vibrant raspberry color, and the well loved R13 flannel shirt was draped into the kind of perfectly messy and cool handkerchief skirt edgy New Yorkers would line up outside a store for.Leba said that Rubin’s book talked about the idea of a “beginner’s mind.
” There’s a purity to naïveté when it comes to creative expression. Ignorance is bliss, and the less one knows, the more one is willing to explore. Leba has now been at it with R13 for a decade and a half; he’s seen it all and knows too much about what works, what doesn’t, and what sells. Still, his takeaway from Rubin’s book was presented in this collection, one of his most compelling of late, as a clear message: Experience and ingenuity are not mutually exclusive.
21 February 2024
There is a paradox to R13 at the moment. Chris Leba makes some of New York’s most intricate and elaborate ready-to-wear. His clothes look simple to the untrained eye, but t-shirts are cut in cashmere with semi-tubular bodies, the washed-out colors in merino wool sweaters are the result not of bleaching but of bleeding from a print on the wrong side of the knit, and sweater graphics are not added via machine intarsia but through hand-needle felting. You can see hands all over Leba’s clothes, which makes one wonder why this pre-fall lookbook was done via AI rather than “traditional” photography.“You can’t fake something that looks this authentic,” Leba said when talking about the printed graphics placed on a tailored jacket. The motifs were first carved into stamps, then stamped repeatedly on the fabric to find “the right level of messed up,” and finally scanned and turned into a series of screens to then be printed onto the finished styles. “The thing is, if you don’t do it for real, then it will look terrible,” Leba offered.The thing about this lookbook is that, bar the AI generated models and backdrops, the clothes are not computer illustrations, but Leba’s actual garments. “That’s all our product, verbatim” Leba promised, without fully disclosing his technique: “It’s basically me merging the AI and our actual product together.” That much can be evidenced by a visit to his showroom—the clothes match the lookbook exactly—but given the general public’s opinion on AI at the moment, it’s hard to not do a double take.Either way, the AI is not the whole story here. The actual backdrop of this lineup is Leba’s desire to steer R13 back to its roots. “You wander and explore and, once you’ve had a little bit of that, you just want to come home,” said the designer. And so he built his collection from the ground—make thatdenim—up in the good old tradition of the original “R13 Denim” moniker. His denim classics here are trimmed with vegetable tanned leather and sometimes come with removable lace-up shearling linings. The proportions of traditional pockets are slightly perverted and seams are sometimes replaced by zippers and collars cut off.Essentials and normalcy are back in fashion of late, but Leba has never done either with the blasé straightforwardness of his counterparts.
What’s everyday at R13 is as far as others will go, and that’s why his customers keep coming back—the label's cool factor is a unique combination of both innate taste and decades of design expertise. Leba’s current fascination is AI, and why would it not be? It’s toeing that fine line between normal and subversive, familiar and new, that has kept him in business. As long as the clothes are real, the images—for now—can tell their own story.
18 December 2023
Mud is quickly becoming synonymous with R13. Here is the spring 2024 collection muddied up at a Glastonbury-esque festival (well, artificially, but more on that later), and last month actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson coveredEsquiremagazine wearingonlya pair of R13 distressed jeans, standing in some sludge. A second photo found him a little more covered up, both with more R13 (a holey T-shirt) and mud (he was absolutely covered in it). But despite its visual impact, the dirt is not the whole story here, rather it’s the way Chris Leba’s clothes take new shape when placed in context. At a music festival, on an outdoor excursion—R13 is as versatile as its wearer.It’s also just as cool. Spring found Leba in a Glastonbury state of mind after he came across a photo of Kate Moss attending the festival wearing short shorts paired with Wellies (you know the one). Then came his fascination with Gorpcore—the wearing of utilitarian apparel as streetwear—which led to this collection. He set his models at his version of Glastonbury and dressed them up in blazers and shorts and parkas and his own take on Wellies (with hefty platform soles).The primary story of spring was a run of bubble hems applied to everything from summer blazers and weightless cardigans to cargo-pocket dresses and shorts. “You know how I get when I find a detail I like,” said Leba at a preview. But this season’s fixation was decisively fruitful; the roundness and airiness were a welcome contrast to Leba’s otherwise grungy interpretations of festivalwear. Most compelling here was a run of low-slung overalls and extra-wide trousers with ballooning proportions when styled tucked into work boots. Novelty came by way of ’90s floral dresses worn under backpacks, leather jackets, and more Wellies—most striking, and most R13, was a long-sleeve frock that ombréd from watercolor florals over an off-white background to solid yellow at the hem. It’s this overworn quality that Leba plays with so convincingly that makes his clothes desirable. Fun, too, were vibrant but slightly washed-out rainbow plaids and denim fabrications.As for the artifice, Leba didnotfly a cast of models and extras to Glastonbury to stage his own version of the festival for this look book. He said that he developed a particular interest for AI after learning how to prompt, and so he spent hours creating the perfect staging, then applying the clothes he made IRL to his AI models.
Placing his collection in context gives it a particular kind of oomph, but having seen these pieces in person, I can attest that there’s nothing like the real thing.R13 is nothing close to unknown, but its absence from the runway has helped it move closer to the “if you know, you know” side of the fashion spectrum. This is a good thing. Leba’s clothes are positively niche, and that’s part of what makes them interesting. They’re not for everyone, but they’re foryou—if you have it in you to channel your inner Glaston-Kate. The secret behind distilling this unique brand of cool into clothes is Leba’s to keep, as is how he managed to include his exact ready-to-wear into these AI-generated images. How does this work? “If I told you, I would have to kill you,” said Leba. Nothing like a well-kept secret.
9 September 2023
There’s nothing like a 60-second video to make you look at things a little differently.A few days ago, R13’s Chris Leba saw an Instagram video in which a content creator broke down a brand that he had noticed many K-pop stars wearing. “Let me tell you about this brand you have probably never heard of,” he started in classic clickbaity fashion. Photos of K-pop idols in distressed sweaters, bleached plaid flannels, stacked leather boots, and sneakers followed. “They love it, they’ve mentioned it by name several times,” he continued. The label in question? R13.Leba and R13 exist in a sweet spot between “if you know, you know” fashion and mainstream style. His clothes are niche enough to not be everyone’s cup of tea but approachable enough so that most people can find something for them on a rack. What K-pop has discovered, it seems, is that Leba’s grunge sensibility (and an m.o. that consists of elevating, in his words, “iconic wardrobe staples”) has made R13 the perfect cool pop-star uniform. Just take a look at HBO’sThe Idol—the show’s post-woke sleazy and wannabe-grunge aesthetic is an ode to the vibe Leba has long been working at R13.Leba’s resort 2024 collection is not in any way influenced by his recent discovery of his K-pop-ularity; the collection was finished by the time he saw the video. But it’s made him see pieces in a different light. As he walked me through his SoHo showroom, he pointed out the pieces on the rack that he thinks will hit the K-pop sweet spot, among them the recurring flannels, this season splattered by gold paint; distressed sweaters and micro cardigans, now screen-printed with gold foil over bleached spots or knit in loose, peak-’90s-grunge gauges; and a pair of black pointy boots with an O-ring harness detail on the toe cap. These details matter—they make the plainest of clothes alluring, and they make the most famous of people look cooler than everyone else, even if they’re wearingjusta flannel shirt.The real winners here, however, are the jeans with different applications of golden foil: woven into the weft of the fabric to offer a delicate but extremely sexy shimmer (“quiet luxury!” Leba said jokingly); applied onto the wrong side of the fabric so it’s only visible when the hems are cuffed; and screen-printed throughout with the creases of the fabric breaking up the coloring. The jeans are classic R13, equal parts punk and elevated. Simultaneously capturing these two attitudes is what makes Leba’s clothing desirable.
Elsewhere, he expanded on his usual construction experiments, which this season included deconstructing and refitting oversized blazers and applying the back vents of coats to the back of pant legs for an unconventional flared effect. Most compelling was a blouse the designer described as “perfect if you like your date”—it had a panel of sheer organza attached to tiny hook-and-eye closures under its placket for a hint of opt-in sexiness.It’s unlikely that Leba will intentionally start designing for K-pop idols; what keeps R13 fresh and consistent, at least in part, is his aversion to trends. But self-awareness is a curious thing, so come back next season to see what effect his recent discovery has on R13. Either way, as Leba says of the development, “sometimes things just develop on their own.”
7 June 2023
“If the R13 girl had to go to a black tie party, what would she wear?”That’s the question Chris Leba kept asking himself after the holiday season had him ruminating on elegance. The R13 girl has an elusive cool, an edgy, undeniably downtown spirit, so how would she approach formal dress?The answer lay in a variety of visuals that remain on Leba’s mind, though the following two felt the most explicit: The first was Ralph Lauren’s—the man—habit of pairing a tuxedo jacket with jeans and cowboy boots for formal outings (Leba described his time at Ralph Lauren as his “roots”). The second was a performance of “My Way” by the Sex Pistols, for which Sid Vicious wore a white tuxedo jacket. “It’s a classic, and every time I see it I think of how you can take this aesthetic and give it a spin,” said Leba during a visit to his sun-drenched SoHo showroom. (Though he was referring to Vicious, he agreed that the same is true of Ralph Lauren.)Leba always describes R13 as being rooted in the classics: A good shirt, a great pair of pants, a well cut jacket, all with a little twist (here is where the Ralph Lauren roots come in, he said). Crisp white button downs were styled with white fishnets on top (“to give it that texture”), and tuxedo pants were reimagined as cargos, their accent satin tape left hanging off d-rings rather than applied onto the side seams. Tailored jackets cut slim and close to the body were accented with satin drawstrings placed under the lapel, cleverly offering an alternative to the traditional tuxedo ruffle; these also found their way onto airy, loose button downs, with the drawstring inserted inside the front plackets.Last season, Leba introduced a Margiela-esque flat two-piece sleeve, which he carried over into this lineup, this time cut in raw-edged leather or finished with satin binding. Another idea he expanded on for fall was his street print experiments, which see him and his team take photos of street art and place them onto garments either blown up, shrunken, or digitally altered—these were particularly compelling this season, and sat well with the overall punk-rock spirit of the lineup.Leba is a textile obsessive, and this season his discoveries included boiled wool (which has proven popular this season so far); a luscious wool suiting—which, according to the mill, “is what James Bond would have his suits made out of,”—repurposed and overdyed jacket liners; and a delicious Japanese red velvet.
The latter was used for a range of tailoring—a standout was a jacket, cut roomier than the rest of the lineup, which looked just like one Vicious wore in the final concert by theSex Pistolsfrom 1978.“We take our irreverence very seriously here at R13,” Leba said. Irreverence is embedded into R13’s DNA, after all, and it’s a language Leba and his customer speak clearly.What does the R13 girl wear to a black tie party? Well, whatever she wants.
13 February 2023
“How do you make something that can live through so many different seasons?” That was the question Chris Leba asked at a pre-fall preview at R13’s SoHo store. Rather than react by doing more, his instinct was to streamline. “I was trying to get a palette that could be delivered in June and live on, but I was also feeling like last season we did so much color and pattern, that I just had to simplify,” he said.Leba is guided by his substantial technical knowledge. In an age when many designers are led by mood boards and strictly visual references, his collections are deft explorations and reimaginings of wardrobe staples. We can chalk it up to his years at Ralph Lauren and his admiration of Rei Kawakubo—whose influences can be spotted in some pieces here. Ultimately, though, it’s his curiosity for rethinking the mundane that gives R13 its cool, downtown charm.Leba described this collection as a “play of disproportion,” and while this could be easily applied to most R13 collections, silhouette is a particular focus in this delivery. The collection’s hero piece is a cowboy boot with an extended vamp and enlarged throat. “The silhouette starts slim at the top with the jackets, and then goes wide into the pants and pours into the boot,” he said.Of Leba’s technical explorations this season, the most compelling is a two-piece sleeve that runs through the collection from tailored jackets down to flannels and knitwear. Set into the shoulder traditionally, the sleeve is pieced at the top of the cap with a raw edge seam traveling down the front and back, creating an illusion of flatness. Other items worth singling out are a “cleaned up” pair of jeans with a center crease to camouflage them as dress pants and tonal embroidery replacing the hardware (like old Lee jeans, Leba said); a hulking bomber jacket where each half is cut from a single piece of fabric, doing away with the shoulder and side seams and pushing the silhouette forward; and a pair of trousers with princess front and back seams in lieu of side seams, eliminating the traditional curved hip in the pattern to streamline the fit.“There’s a lot of thinking that goes into how we make these pieces special,” Leba said. “Our fabrics, we always use the legit stuff; you cannot fake this, this is generations of weaving.” Last season, Leba played with digitally printed plaids, applying them to airy cotton button-downs and even knitwear. This time around the idea was translated into paint-splattered printed tweeds.
“You live with something for a few months and then when it comes to the next collection, you want a different flavor,” he said. “I feel like fashion is moving towards that, and I’ve been around for long enough to see things slowly change.”
7 December 2022
Chris Leba of R13 loves making clothes. During a walk-through of the spring 2023 collection late last night at the label’s store in SoHo, he couldn’t help but point out every process and construction detail it took to arrive at his offering. It included digital printing over knitwear; distressing incorporated in knits as intarsia detailing; denim flies moved from center front to elsewhere on the garments; double bibs on overalls; printed bleached flannel artwork on gauze shirting; and, my absolute favorite, a cropped crisp white button-down shirt made with one single piece of fabric and no seams (with an added yoke, of course; it’s a dress shirt after all). Leba spent years at Ralph Lauren prior to launching R13, and it shows in his meticulous eye for detail that wondrously reimagines the most basic of closet staples season after season.A vintage skateboard was the starting point for this collection: the logos of its distressed stickers and the texture of its well-aged surface. It led Leba and his team to create a wardrobe fit for a skater. “We started thinking about skateboarders and what they do, movement, the freedom they need to skate,” he said. “That led us to these oversized silhouettes. It’s also a summer collection, so I love the idea of just throwing on a pair of big overalls; that’s the mood here.” He still wanted to ensure consistency, though: “R13 is like a great band; you always know their sound, but it’s always a different song.”Leba strives to properly capture the mood of his inspiration in the most honest and realistic way possible. “I like to nail down the authenticity of a piece and then start to mess with it,” he said, showing a de-colored flannel that is actually made of gauze (because it’s summer): It just has the aged flannel artwork printed on it. Ditto for the distressed sweaters that have carefully placed rips and tears, all printed on top to either resemble denim or replicate the perfect tie-dye. “Once you get it right, tie-dye is so hard to replicate,” he said with a laugh. Leba has learned to use technology in a way that lifts his handwork and craftsmanship.On the next rack of clothing, a series of pink (yes, that pink) pieces appeared. “Pink is actually a very punk color,” Leba said. As a hue trending with Barbiecore and familiarly associated with cuteness and primness, it’s prime for the taking and subverting, which is what R13 does best.The funny and perhaps most compelling thing about R13 is how studied the collections are.
From wired headphone belts to “fuck you” underwear waistbands, Leba knows what details make the look, and he knows how to lean into them to authenticate his own über-luxurious version of what the downtown kids are wearing.
10 September 2022