There is a paradox in R13 right now. Chris Leba creates some of New York’s most intricate and elaborate ready-to-wear. His clothes look simple to the untrained eye, but T-shirts are made of cashmere and have semi-tubular bodies. Knitted and sweater images are not added via machine intarsia, but via hand needle felting. You can see hands all over Leba’s clothes, which makes you wonder why this pre-fall lookbook was created via AI instead of ‘traditional’ photography.
“You can’t recreate something that looks so authentic,” Leba said when talking about the printed graphics on a custom jacket. The motifs were first cut into stamps, then repeatedly stamped onto the fabric to find “the right level of confusion,” and finally scanned and converted into a series of screens to be printed onto the finished styles. “The thing is, if you don’t actually do it, it looks terrible,” Leba suggested.
What’s special about this lookbook is that, apart from the AI-generated models and backgrounds, the clothes are not computer illustrations, but Leba’s actual garments. “That’s literally our entire product,” Leba promised, without fully revealing his technique: “It’s basically about me merging the AI and our actual product.” That much can be proven by a visit to its showroom – the clothes match the lookbook exactly – but given public opinion about AI at the moment, it’s hard not to do a double take.
Anyway, the AI isn’t the whole story here. The actual background of this line-up is Leba’s desire to return R13 to its roots. “You wander around and explore, and once you’ve had a bit of that, you just want to come home,” the designer said. And so he built his collection from the ground up – make that denim– in the good old tradition of the original ‘R13 Denim’ name. His denim classics here are trimmed with vegetable-tanned leather and sometimes feature removable shearling linings with laces. The proportions of traditional pockets are somewhat perverse and seams are sometimes replaced with zippers and cut-off collars.
Essentials and normalcy have been back in vogue lately, but Leba has done neither with the blasé straightforwardness of his counterparts. What happens every day at R13 goes further than others will go, and that’s why its 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 wouldn’t it be? It’s navigating the fine line between normal and subversive, familiar and new, that has kept him in business. As long as the clothing is real, the images can – for now – tell their own story.
