When all is said and done, punk, blue jeans, and the heady ’90s may be the most powerful and enduring forces in fashion. It’s good luck, then, that they are the three pillars upon which Chris Leba has built his brand R13. In a recent preview at his showroom in Lower Manhattan, the designer invoked Vivienne Westwood, the unfussy cool of Winona Ryder in the lead-up to the 21st century, and, of course, his ongoing fixation with all things denim, as the galvanizing lodestars of his spring collection.
“We always take our stuff and rework it, to take it out of the norm,” said Leba, a graduate of the unofficial University of Ralph Lauren. “We like to fuck it up, mix it with Americana, that’s our DNA.” It helps that he has an obsessive streak in him (don’t get him started on jeans) and a desire to recreate the rebellious gestures of the street, but enough design chops to imbue clothes with a built-in attitude that his customers—willing to hand over a few hundred bucks for distressed jeans and fraying flannels—may not possess themselves. This season, the big shift came in the lighter palette, like soft cyan blues and a surfeit of creamy tones. Most interestingly, he seemed captivated with, of all things, Chantilly lace—a French handcraft technique that he saw connected to Japanese selvedge denim—which he embedded into slashed ribbed tanks, or used as delicate edging on roughed-up camisoles.
Other highlights included long fringe pouring off flirty tops, louche rugbys made not from jersey but fluttery rayon and cut wide on the body, and dead simple slip dresses in faded floral prints, which easily conjured those ’90s off-duty starlets, like Ryder, yes, but also Gwyneth Paltrow. As is Leba’s wont, they were often splattered or tattered, a sort of Westwood-esque wink at the idea of handcraftsmanship. Let other brands play in the sandbox of sangfroid minimalism, Leba’s having all the fun chasing the hard-edged cool of the street.
Funnily, it was the opening looks that seemed to excite the designer most—funny because they were white T-shirts and jeans, the most classic uniform of the American canon, and yet one that burrows into the brain. Leba found his way, as he says, to fuck it up. That came in slouchy, worked-over denim with its deep fading and paint splotches, or tough baggy cut-off shorts, contrasted with slim-cut, high-shouldered tees made from loopwheel cotton. They had in them something natural and unforced, a nonchalance that was deeply American and, in its way, punk. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that leave the biggest impression.
