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 remotely cool. 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.
