“You know, it’s in the air, this sort of darkness,” said Chris Leba this morning at an appointment at his R13 showroom. He was talking about the moody, gothy florals he printed on cotton and wool blend gauzes and the dramatic, chiaroscuro Garden of Eden-esque prints he rendered in flocked fabrics and velvets. But he was also talking about culture at large.
Leba mentioned Dune: Part Two and Robert Eggers’s fantastic gothic horror Nosferatu as two recent films that have inspired him to explore this noir territory, and that, he argues, have permeated into culture aesthetically. There’s that, yes, and the mere bleakness of the political and cultural landscape in the U.S. at the moment. Leba’s clothes are punk fantasies for grown ups: They have rips and chains and safety pins and bleach spots and all those fun, alternative things, but they’re also made of cashmeres and Japanese cottons and silks. They’re rebellious, and can in that sense meet this particular moment, but are well-made in a way that makes them timeless and worth the investment.
Also in the air, Leba said, speaking of the houndstooths and velvets and overall brownness of this collection, is a “sort of ’70s vibe.” The decade’s silhouettes and sumptuousness—velvets, flares, and such—were trending at the fall men’s collections just two weeks ago. The current appetite for the that time is primarily based on its aesthetics, but there’s no denying that, together with the return of that Summer of Love-ish boho vibe last year, there’s a cultural undertone that is craving the escapism of then. Leba’s take stood out for its, well, Leba-ness: His beige houndstooths were oversized and cut into cool, rounded bombers; and those velvet and flocked textures were printed and used in anything but a classic suit—a coat-dress with two rows of buttons was cool and funky and could’ve fit Lily-Rose Depp’s character had Nosferatu been set in the ’90s Lower East Side. Such is Leba’s touch that even something that can at first feel referential—“I do believe in a collective conciseness,” he said—takes on its own, singular shape.
