Leon Emanuel Blanck

LEB developed into an active secondary line with its own archive, retail section and two named seasonal collections. Its authorship combines artistic direction by Illya Goldman Gubin with creative vision by Leon Emanuel Blanck, while Kollektion Eins adds Italian garment and footwear production to the wider label’s Berlin-centred practice.

Illya Goldman Gubin became artistic director of LEB as the secondary line developed a dedicated archive, shop presence and seasonal collections. Leon Emanuel Blanck provides the line’s creative vision, establishing a continuing division of authorship within the wider brand.

For the 2025 ZENON project, Leon Emanuel Blanck worked with Alpinestars RSRV by dismantling original racing gear and placing Blanck’s jacket, trouser and boot patterns over the recovered material. The same project extended into the separate Zenon One custom motorcycle, broadening the atelier’s engagement with motorsport materials and machinery.

Polygon appeared in 2024 as an angular counter-project to the flowing seam architecture of Anfractuous Distortion, using hard lines and geometry informed by military hardware. At the same time, the label explicitly presented men’s and women’s clothing and footwear, making its mixed-gender commercial scope visible within the mainline.

By November 2023 Leon Emanuel Blanck had opened an appointment-only showroom at Herzbergstraße 55 in Berlin, consolidating the city as the label’s public creative and client-facing base. Heidelberg remained part of the business through its legal notice, while the Berlin site carried the atelier’s current fashion and object practice.

In January 2023 Blanck presented 0110 SPECIMEN at Rue Martel in Paris alongside the seasonal 0110 collection. Ten two-metre constructions combined X-ray exoskeletons and archival garments before being fixed in large quantities of epoxy, turning a decade of movement-led fashion into static sculptural specimens.

Leon Emanuel Blanck collaborated with Berlin footwear company Trippen on Christo in 2022. Heavy leather wrapping concealed and reshaped the underlying shoe, extending the label’s garment-wrapping logic into a specialised footwear construction.

The early 2020s widened the atelier beyond seasonal clothing through named jewellery systems and standalone objects. LIQUID and FRACTURE translated flowing and broken surfaces into metal, while furniture and resin works carried Blanck’s interest in bodily form into static objects.

Illya Goldman Gubin collaborated with Leon Emanuel Blanck on STRUKTUR in 2021, embedding Distortion footwear within sculptural works. The shoes could remain sealed inside the artwork or be released only by breaking into it, making use and destruction part of the project’s form.

Forced Perspective was publicly articulated in 2018 as a mirrored derivative of Anfractuous Distortion. By selecting one side of an existing pattern and reflecting it across a central axis, Blanck retained the label’s dense seam language in a more repeatable construction system.

Blanck formalised Anfractuous Distortion in the first full seasonal cycle, developing patterns from fabric wrapped and pinned on a moving body. Its non-mirrored panels, displaced seams and three-dimensional body casts became a persistent construction system across the label’s clothing and sculptural work.

Blanck travelled to Paris in January 2013 with an eight-piece capsule and a resin sculpture, showing independently from a small Marais space. The presentation secured the label’s first wholesale orders and established Paris appointments as its route into the international fashion market.

Leon Emanuel Blanck has remained the principal designer of the label he founded in 2012. His remit spans the mainline clothing, footwear and object practice, while later projects introduce collaborators without replacing his authorship of the parent label.

Leon Emanuel Blanck founded his eponymous label in Heidelberg in 2012 and established its first atelier at the Dezernat 16 creative centre. The same period produced the Genesis trouser experiment, beginning the movement-led construction practice that would define the label.