Looking at the images of Lii’s spring 2025 collection, you might be surprised to learn the inspiration was Michael Haneke movies. “The characters are in a very formal or very intense space, but then somehow there’s a breakthrough or a break point that basically becomes the plot of the movie,” designer Zane Li said in the Chinatown studio where he was showing his collection. “I’m really attracted by the intensity of people in a formal location or in a formal space, so I thought, Okay, let’s think about how to undo eveningwear.”
The look book opened with a sort of bandeau-cape, which is Li’s version of the classic fur shrug. Except in his case, he took the shape of a T-shirt and connected the sleeves to wrap around the body. It might sound like a piece of clothing that is “not functional,” but the minute you slip it on, it forces you to adapt the sort of formal stance of wearing a shrug, and then suddenly it all clicks—it’s the same as balancing a pashmina about your arms as you walk around a dinner party, arms extended in perpetual glamour.
A simple shift dress the color of a beige file folder seems to be half-floating in front of a model’s body. It wasn’t a styling trick, but a dress with one sleeve, except the other sleeve was still present and left open at the shoulder seam. Underneath was layered a black top with a similar yet opposing design; instead of leaving the shoulder seam open, Li created a long loop that connects the two. Meanwhile, on a simple geometric dress with spaghetti straps, the back extended like an upside-down shark fin, but it was just the classic cowl back of an evening gown made from a stiffer fabric that provides more dramatic results (it could also be worn the regular way).
Another short-sleeve dress had a cutout at the waist, with a wide panel tied around the waist that created a kind of cowl-neck effect, which was sort of mirrored by the way the fabric on the bodice hung over the belt. Although in photographs Li’s clothes might seem like complicated garments with zero real-life utility, they are, in fact, things you can just literally throw on and go, often made from cotton and other technical and sporty fabrics perfect for living. Li has already done all the thinking in his design, adding as much impact as he can while simultaneously subtracting everything unnecessary so that you don’t have to think about anything when getting dressed.
Such is the magic of Li’s work; in only two collections he has managed to create an incredibly deep visual vocabulary that feels modern and exciting but also harks back to the last vestiges of our pre-millennium tension before 9/11, before the complete dominance of the internet, before AI. Like a purer vision of a future that never quite arrived, but maybe now, we can have it after all.
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