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 that denim—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.
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