“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 read The Creative Act: A Way of Being by 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 to look like 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.
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