Last year, long-time RC collaborator—the artist, writer, professor, and editor Leanne Shapton—joined The New York Review Of Books as its first-ever art editor. Bringing her effervescent eye to the magazine, Leanne has created one arresting, dynamic cover after the next. Her ability to join a painting, elegant type, and brilliant cover lines together on newsprint speaks to our core as designers. Mixing content, aesthetics, provocation, and purpose always makes for an interesting collection.

We had an idea to collaborate: to use The New York Review Of Books’ covers on RC clothes. We selected five covers from December 2021 to March 2022, displaying the work of artists Greg Burak, Yuichi Yokoyama, Una Ursprung, Tucker Nichols, and Clara Adolphs, with cover lines announcing the articles and reviews by NYRB writers including Lauren Groff, Vivian Gornick, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sheila Heti, and Yiyun Li.

For each garment, we cropped and rearranged the covers for design purposes and a certain abstract legibility. We liked the idea of current events, books and writers’ bylines being a part of the literal fabric of our clothes.

In 2019, Emily Greenhouse, then 32, became The NYRB’s editor, bringing new, diverse voices and perspectives to its 60 yr-old pages. As a fashion company interested in politics, movements, civil rights and the arts, the content of the magazine has never been so relevant to us or our customers. Shapton’s covers bring an urgency and aesthetic appeal to the traditionally newsy and thoughtful content we subscribe for—at RC, we like the contrast between literary, political and fashionable.