There are certain designers who just know what they want to do, a creativity within them that just needs to find it's home and their creativity can flourish.
Lisa Deurer is one of those artists. Born in Germany, in a small town in Augsburg, close to Munich, to two parents who always encouraged her creativity meant that Deurer was exploring what she wanted to do from an early age.
Here Deurer tells me about how she got started in the world of fashion, how her gender fluid, locally made, clothing brand LD-13 was born, and how out of a darker time in her life she really found what she was meant to do. The evolution of Deurer's process has led her to creating a brand that focuses on how her clothes make her customer feel. Not putting a label on them, or the clothes themselves, but focusing on the confidence and comfortability her clothes evoke. But let's start at the beginning, because her journey is a fascinating one.
“My mum and dad instilled creativity in me from 2-3 years old. I actually first did a detour, I played soccer a lot growing up, to a teenage phase. I got almost to a professional level back home in Germany. But too many injuries led me to give up that career. I had to go through several operations.”
This took its toll emotionally on Deurer, as she tells me, “ After that I had a mental illness, and that really led to art therapy and that really sparked that interest in art again from a different perspective.”
Despite this dark time, and a turn of career from what Deurer thought she might have been headed for, she came out the other side, and it was through this difficult time, that she really rediscovered her love of the arts and creating. “I really understood how I could use art as a medium to communicate and after school, I thought, now what’s next? So I went to New York."
"My family always used to travel to the states, New York at that time was very liberating for me. I felt it was a sign that I needed to go to an art school maybe. Parson’s felt like the right fit for me. So I went to the admissions office, and I met this person called Katie. I showed her my art portfolio, this was in 2016 and she told me, “Hey girl I can see you have talent, but I don’t see you yet in your art work”
Deurer continues, “I was very 2D orientated then" She told Deurer, "Just go out and live art over the summer and show me what you create when you come back. Get back to business and show me what you’ve done."
Deurer took her advice to heart and did just that, “I asked my grandmother over the summer, “Can you show me how to sew?” at this stage, Deurer tells me she didn’t even know how to sew a button on a shirt, but she was really interested in learning, “She just taught me hand-stitching and I just fell in love with it. My grandmother said to me that I was picking up things really fast and she thought I had a talent there. And I just kept going. I was doing local courses in sewing and really exploring this 3D perspective. Then I showed Katie what I did over the summer." Katie told her, "You really exploded from where you left off over the summer, you really took off."
In the November Deurer showed Katie her portfolio again, and she said, “I’m not allowed to tell you, but we want you.” It was the moment Deurer realized, “I am good at something, I need to pursue this.”
Deurer wanted to explore and know every aspect of the industry, to be aware of every stage that went into creating a business. After she put her portfolio together, Deurer did an internship in fashion with a company that is no longer in business in Germany. However it took her through all the stages she'd soon need to know for herself, from production, assistant designing, sorting collections, doing the "shitty work", every aspect, but she loved it all, “It taught me that pursuing fashion wasn’t just a flimsy idea, but something that I was meant to do, so I kept on going.”
“Parson’s was so liberating for me” Deurer says, “After the foundation year, I did a fashion course, then when my teachers asked me to sew a pencil skirt, I did it, but my pencil skirt always stretched the boundaries. It wasn’t a typical pencil skirt. Then the dean began to notice me, and they really supported me there.”
One opportunity that led to where Deurer is now, was the chance to meet with Isabella Rosellini. In 2019 Rosellini invited a materiality and systems class to her farm because she felt that students didn’t know where materials came from anymore and that needed to change.
“She really sparked a fire there for me.” Deurer says. “Being from a very small village called Augsburg, that in the 15th Century used to be the textile hotspot and where people traded. We were getting our wool just outside of the city center. And I thought, wow, we used to have all this, we used to work with wool local breeds. Why don’t we do this anymore? And she was telling us in the U.S we have so many breeds but no one makes use of that."
We get our wool from Australia because it has fine microns but why do we have to ship it across the world if we have it here? We just need to be more creative in the way that we mix materiality characteristics together. Like with mohair, there are so many possibilities there. I thought, damn, she’s hitting a point, I want to know more about it.
This was a huge turning point for Deurer and has undoubtably brought her to where she is today. “That made me really put all my research on wool. When Covid hit, in New York there was a total lockdown and I flew back home to Germany for a few months, but that didn’t stop me from calling farmers in the US and asking them,
Do you want to collab with me for this thesis? I have this crazy idea and I don’t know if it will work but I want to source wool from you. I want to work with American wool in Connecticut and produce a heritage breed textile that doesn’t exist yet. One farmer in Pennsylvania said yes to me. It was from the breed romeldale. It’s very similar to merino breed, it has similar characteristics, and she had 200 sheep back in Pennsylvania. I said I will convince my thesis director to work with American wool. After that he put me in touch with Jacob the CEO from American wool. I pitched to him, and then that’s how it got going, he loved the idea, we sourced 500 pounds. I talked with a guy who would wash my wool, a guy down south in Alabama. And then we got it shipped back to Connecticut to American wool and they wove our textile. It took two years and was a lot of work but I got three hundred meters of my own textile from the sheep that I know in Pennsylvania.
Deurer graduated from Parsons in 2020 and as soon as she did, she hit the ground running. By 2021 she had created her gender fluid brand, LD-13.
She had worked together with Isabella Rossellini throughout school and began doing things outside of school because people were requesting pieces of hers, "That's how it all started" Deurer tells me, “With Isabella I was working on the supply chain in school in the U.S and that really kickstarted everything. I was producing my own textiles. I was working in the garment district with a few people on site. So doing LD-13 after school felt like a natural next step.”
“Right now in the garment district in New York we are working on a coat that we are pitching to the wholesale people and are starting to sell in the U.S.”
Deurer, is inspiring, despite being a new brand, she knows the possibilities of making pieces locally, having done it before she'd even graduated and with the added challenge of Covid at the time, she still managed to make it work. Deurer tells me,
Local production is possible, you just need to keep talking together and working together and putting things in place
Deurer goes back and forth between New York and Berlin with a community in both places. She is now working with a Berlin photographer which has currently brought her back to Berlin. She also has a team in NY that are in the process of selling to wholesale.
As for her brand LD-13, and the inspiration behind creating a gender fluid brand, Deurer tells me is down to her never setting boundaries for herself. Her mother was also the same, creating pieces of clothes that she likes for herself. Still very tailored base, wearing what she wants. Dressing in what makes her feel comfortable and confident and not putting a label on what she chooses to wear.
Deurer tells me, “I really like the concept of Ray Kawakuba, (Japanese designer) who doesn't believe in having a mirror in her store, but more having customers feel how they felt in her clothes, not seeing a reflection and thinking ‘You look crazy,’ but how do you feel in these clothes?”
Not every piece in the collection is gender fluid but most pieces are, Deurer says. However she will say that men who have more of a softer side to them tend to look more suited to her clothes. Sometimes Deurer herself will see a man in her pieces, like the skirt and be blown away by how good it looks on them, mix-matching the pieces to suit their style.
Deurer is headed into wholesale as we speak. She is in touch with, “Charles, who is from Hong Kong. I met him through mutual friends in the garment district." Deurer showed him her pieces and said "I would love to move into wholesale, you know my pieces, my brand, can we work together?" It was a perfect fit, as Deurer tells me, "He’s worked for John-Paul Gautier in the past and he gets all the edginess and avant-garde aspect of my work."
A brand from a designer that knows every step and process of her garments and that allows her customer to wear what they want and interpret the pieces as they choose? Count me in..
Find LD-13 at:
Website: LD-13
FLYING SOLO
IG: LD-13
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