In 2024, the designer Zane Li, based in New York, visited the exhibition of contemporary artist Douger, “Day Fight Day” in the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, and it was a transcendent experience for him. “When you come in, you are a white canvas in front of you,” he says, “but then you go deeper and you see the lights, you hear the music, you see all of these textures. You can find this feeling of the plot from a very flat view.” It is a visually confusing approach that is characteristic of its own design sensitivity in every foreign cover, to the side blazer and in every jacket that is masked as a skirt.
Yesterday Li organized his first runway show for his two-year brand Lii during the New York Fashion Week. Industry eye weights flowed for the opportunity to see the latest iteration of his design fort through the stroll designer. “In the past seasons we only made books from a look. How the audience gets the clothes was pretty flat.” The runway campaign made it possible for his clothing to bring to life. In one case, a model approaches you when you piling up cotton t-shirts and a black, knee-length skirt, which appears to a green mini when turning over. In a different look you can see with a 360-degree view, like a windbreaker from the cords, its neck hole at the back instead of the front. In other cases, you can see how Li relies on fabric to create new, shaped curvatures and how the excess material wakes up behind the models behind the models.
Immediately after completing the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2023, Li started a small collection in which the dialogue between the formal and casual wear was examined by his home in Chongqing, China. Some of his first ideas focused on this stubborn share game and the imaginative silhouettes in technical fabric and vice versa. “We talk about integrating casualness in evening clothes,” he explains to “mix fabrics in order to make something formal, but then their real experience is still casual and practical.”
He is still shocked by the positive reception he has already received, and only two years of a doctoral degree. He presents a full-grown runway show. But that feels right; Lii never wanted to design in vacuum. A short but influential internship in the Fabric Department of Proenza Schouler taught him that there are so many facets to operate a brand – and that you should theoretically work together. “It is like cooking and then put all the ingredients in the same pot,” laughs Lii. He loves to think about music -a big fan of Deep House -, the place, hair and the make -up, “to actually present this collection in a more structural way,” he says. “It only feels satisfactory as a designer. It's more about the clothes.
For his spring collection in 2026, he corrected the show goods to Tribeca and mixed them into a white whitewashed gallery room that was frantic of the floor that was pink. The interiors compensate for the colors of its collection: strongly black and white, which have been interrupted with shocks by primary colors such as red, green and blue. “I come from a very foggy industrial city,” he says. “When I grew up, I always looked for a color, even if it was a bright yellow piece of paper on the floor.” The clothing itself included the dissonance of one of LI: Sportswear's favorite concepts. It is one that makes many people wrong – and somewhere in this confusion the concept is behind the brand.
“At the beginning I was confused by this wording, as I thought that sports swear was more on athleisure,” he reflects, but real sportswear that he saw as a word that is essentially synonymous with ready-to-wear synonym. He loves the way in which American designers like Calvin Klein and Helmut Lang created this new category of random but polished clothing in the nineties, as Miuccia Prada still integrates elements of active clothing in high fashion collections. The word and its contradictory elements, sporty, formal and casual wear, “are a perfect combination of what I am currently trying to do with Lii.” (Many of the technical substances of this season come from a partnership with Nike.)
He is not afraid to look back further to question these relatively modern concepts. Li attributes many of his studies to the fashion sizes such as Madame Grès and Cristobal Balenciaga – whereby he deals with his own interpretation in a reference to Balenciaga. “For example, you see how Cristobal plays with a place, and then you think:” Oh, in my own closet I have this vest jacket, which is also square, “he says (Li's own wardrobe is very much influenced by sports clothing).” The two ideas are the same, but due to the different context of each era, the execution is different. We would like to examine this to test the borders and then try to create a new modern version. “