Introducing LED Queens – tights fit for one…or a king…

Introducing LED Queens! The brand was launched in 2017 by Cesar Torres. It began as a new gymwear line that embraces color and launches it forward into a futuristic ride that journeys through the worlds of bodybuilding, powerlifting and fitness. Many of the designs come directly from the sci-fi worlds created the creator, and the mascot of the brand is Pablito, a young gay bodybuilder in New York, who is never afraid to be himself. LED Queens supports all people, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual identity. This is gym gear for Queer Punks, after all. We’ve got a great treat coming up for you when one of our bloggers reviews a pair of LED Queens tights, but for now we thought it would be great to get to know the brand a bit better – so we posed a series of questions to the creator. Enjoy!

What made you start LED Queens and why tights? My story is a very strange one.  I earned my journalism at Northwestern University back in the 1990s, and since then, I spent 25 years working as a journalist for publications such as the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, Encyclopaedia Britannica and The Wirecutter (which is part of the New York Times). And like many journalists, I had several book manuscripts in my drawer. My first book, The 12 Burning Wheels published in 2010, and it was followed by the publication of  How to Kill a Superhero Book 1 (2013) and 13 Secret Cities (2014). Now you’re probably thinking, what do books have to do with fashion design and muscle dudes in tights? Well, a lot. In 2016, whenI left my day job as an editor for The Wirecutter, I also launched a small online shop that featured designs I had created on t-shirts that used many symbols and images from my published books, which happen to be sci fi and fantasy. I created that storefront as a way to continue the sci-fi universes I had already created in my books, and I designed the gym gear to appeal to people eta liked powerlifting, bodybuilding, Crossfit and fitness, all of which are a huge part of my life. So, my entry into the world of fitness apparel and fashion design was very unusual, like me. And you’re probably thinking, why tights? The answers to that question are found inside my books. I write two series: The Coil, which is a dystopian sci-fi book where the Aztec gods enter our dimension as America becomes a more authoritarian dystopia. I also wrote the book series How to Kill a Superhero under the pen name Pablo Greene. The four HTKS books are very queer, very kinky, and the main character Roland is obsessed with the sexiness of spandex superhero suits. I mean, like, really really obsessed. And ain’t no shame in that. When I started to publish the HTKS books in New York City, I designed and sold limited-edition spandex items as official merchandise for each book. The first items I designed were colorful wrestling singlets, which proved to be really popular with my readers. After the singlets, I experimented with tights. By 2015, I had two years under my belt of designing spandex gear for the HTKS books, and the reason I designed tights is that tights are the perfect fashion item to express a superhero aesthetic, which is what those books are all about. But those early tights designs I made for the HTKS storefront were always limited edition, and they went away once I had sold all my stock. I really didn’t have plans to make tights my flagship product, even though they sold well with fans of the books. How did it all start? Let’s fast forward to 2016, when I left my day job and I had launched that tiny storefront for t-shirts.  I called it 13SC Fitness Apparel. It was named after my book 13 Secret Cities. I was mostly focused on t-shirts at the time, and if you go to the very first posts of my Instagram, you can even see some of those early designs. But then a strange thing happened! I had released a couple of pairs of the How to Kill a Superhero tights from years before just as a test in that store, and one of my customers found that product listing on the site, even though it was not visible on the home page. He bought them, and he was extremely happy with the tights, and then it occurred tome that perhaps I could design more tights for 13SC, now that I was selling my products to an audience of fitness-minded people, and not just bookworms and kinky superhero fans. For the next year, I made a few sales and added more tees, hoodies and tights. But by the summer of 2017, it was very clear that the biggest demand I had was for the gym tights I created. I have been wearing tights since I was a teen, for both fitness and for style, and what I design is always driven by color. I had noticed that nowadays, most tights for men are designed with very dark and muted colors. My artistic vision is the opposite. The world we live in is so grim and challenging, that I would rather have color on my legs to remind me to be brave and to also enjoy the beauty of the world when I can. After a year of talking to my early customers, I learned that they loved how much color I used, and many of them noted that my designs didn’t look like anything else they had seen before. I decided to rebrand my store with a new name in summer of 2017 in order to reflect the amazing energy that was building. I wanted to choose a name that was easier to remember, and a name that tied together the concepts of futurism, queerness, superheroes, robotics, and a name that also came directly from my books. I called the brand LED Queens, which to me, expresses all those ideas in a very punchy name. Every design in the store is named after characters, monsters, places and ideas from my books, and I consider LED Queens a spinoff from my sci-fi universe I write. Renaming my store from 13SC to LED Queens created an immediate chain reaction. By now I had met many of my customers, and almost all of them happened to be LGBTQ+ people who care a lot about their fitness. I began to take in more of their feedback into account, and things accelerated from there. I released many more designs, more colors, and even new products like hats, smartphone cases and more. Since then, the brand has grown in a way that has changed my life! Obviously, I design for everyone, but the truth is that gay and queer fans of LED have shaped the brand. I am proud to offer LED fans a place where we are proud to show our faces and announce that we are Queer Punks (which is part of the tagline of the brand). This winter I sponsored an LGBTQ+ weightlifting seminar here at Rockwell Barbell gym in Chicago, and I am continuing to expand into more events where queer, gay, trans and other people like us can thrive around weightlifting and fitness.

Did you have other designers that were an inspiration for you? What a great question. I am inspired first and foremost by the images from my books. That’s the true source. Also, electronic music is a huge part of my books, and many of my own tights designs are named after electronic music genres. Music really does inspire my design, too.  But I definitely do look up to several icons of fashion, too. Pam Hogg is a true inspiration. She has designed stunning pieces that are bold and savage, and I wish she had more recognition from the industry. She’s a true force of nature. Incidentally, she has designed gorgeous spandex bodysuits for women a few times in her career, and she is quite an autodidact, so we have a bit of a parallel with each other there. I also love the work of Jean Paul Gaultier, because he is able to synthesize sex appeal and playfulness in so much of his body of work. And I think I also have to mention a myriad comic book artists as my fashion-design inspirations, because I design for men’s bodies in the gym, and the image of superheroes continues to influence my imagination as a designer. These comic book artists may not be fashion designers as such, but they have been dressing muscular hunks in skintight spandex for decades, and I owe them a huge thank you for inspiring me. They are Alex Ross, Steve Ditko, the incredible Dave Gibbons, and Mark Bagley. How often do you expand the collection and add new designs or pieces? I release new collections and designs on two separate schedules. The first one is based on seasonality, just like other designers release designs. In other words, I plan for certain designs to launch for the arrival of spring, summer, fall and winter, as well as meaningful times of the year. In particular, I release some designs to anticipate Pride month in June, since so many customers want pride-themed designs that are not generic or basic rainbow designs that you would grab at CVS and then trash a week later. There is also a second calendar I use at LED Queens is what makes my brand so special. Because my designs come from the books I write and publish, there are many designs that get released throughout the year to LED fans as a total surprise. I often drop brand new designs into the site suddenly, and I LED fans LOVE this. It’s these surprise releases that have made LED fans get so excited, and in particular, it’s the release of new tights that get my customers buzzing with anticipation.  Just last week I released Plasma and Analog, two really fun designs that are perfect winter tights and which can help fight against the grayness of winter. What is your favourite design so far in the collection? That’s a very tough question to answer! To date, I have released hundreds of t-shirts, and 63 pairs of tights. But out of all the designs I have launched, I think that three tights remain my favorites. The first is Acid House, which is named after the sub-genre of house music, and which was worn by contestant Brian Cookstra on the show Nailed It! Holiday! on Netflix this past season. My eyes exploded when I saw Acid House on freakin’ Netflix! Another one of my favorites is Xolotl, which is named after an Aztec god that is featured in my book 13 Secret Cities. The Xolotl tights are full of explosive, rich colors, but they also have a very sexy darkness. And I also love Synthpop, because that’s been so far the runaway hit at LED Queens. It is the most popular design with my customers, and its colors have become legendary. They are really fun to wear, and they really do look and feel like Synthpop music. When you wear them, I highly recommend playing Depeche Mode, Flans, Soft Cell, La Prohibida and Erasure for maximum effect. You will really feel Synthpop all the way.

Do you do any custom work and if so, is that as exciting as creating all of your other pieces? I have released hundreds of products at this point, and I have customers in the U.S, Canada, Mexico, Europe, the UK, El Salvador and Asia, and that means that we were serving lots of LED fans around the world. I have designed my tights and other apparel with male-presenting people in mind, and I make sizes as small as XS, and depending on the design, sizes as large as 4XL. However, I don’t do any custom work at LED Queens. I run a very small operation, and that’s by choice. That’s not to say I’m not open to working on a commission piece. Designing a custom look for a musician or perhaps a sports team is something I would be open to, but it has to fit within my business model. Some brands want to grow into huge teams, with hundreds of employees, but at this point, I am not interested in such explosive growth. As a result, that means that at LED Queens I don’t do any custom work for the catalog of products in my store, but I do listen to feedback from all my customers, and I am always working on new features for my products that can benefit LED fans all around the world. I do get requests from time to time for things such as drawstrings and other features, and I am constantly doing more research and development with my manufacturers to test and roll out such new features.  Customer service is a priority for me at LED. I read and respond to every email and DM from my customers, and many of them know that even if we can’t customize designs, there are many ways in which we can help them find the design  they need in my store. It’s all about the LED fans. They make this brand what it is.

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