This year, Zane Li introduced menswear to his fledgling label. “The [two collections] definitely informed each other. There’s a lot of outerwear ideas that carried over from men’s—I would say the men’s collection is kind of an experiment for women’s, like we did the men’s for the women’s to look better.” he said with a laugh in his Paris studio. The most obvious examples of the crossover were the sporty two-tone vest and a terrific windbreaker style with a built-in bolero. He had also shown voluminous shorts for his menswear collection, which became a simple A-line knee-length skirt shirred at the waist that perfectly floated around the body like a hoop skirt. They both begin life as a flat square, Li explained as he undid the shirring on the skirt and held out a very, very long panel of fabric in front of him.
Flatness is a recurring theme in Li’s work, but the results are somehow never actually flat or two dimensional—even when a dress or a skirt seems to stand in straight angles next to or around the body, the body is always part of the equation. A tank top with a flat ruffle was achieved by “copy/pasting” the tank’s pattern and then letting it sort of… hang there. On another tank there was a flat panel at the front and another on the back, almost like an apron, but the way the back piece fell seemed to caress the shoulders like an elegant stole. The elegance, though, was not accidental. Li was also thinking of Cristóbal Balenciaga, specifically, his Envelope Dress. “Normally on women’s clothes we use darts to be more fitted to the curve of the body, but I just take it as a starting point, and then play around with a flat surface of the body or a different texture,” he explained. Two sleeveless T-shirts, one red and one charcoal, layered over each other were gathered on one side with a series of “darts on the outside” that created a “soft romantic volume.”
There is an underlying simplicity in Li’s clothes, where there’s always more than meets the eye: a seemingly straightforward single-breasted coat was almost completely open in the back, with big velcro sections on the back which could be brought up to create an almost bustle-like volume. And while minimal, borderline-experimental clothes can often lack a sense of playfulness, here it was abundant. See the two-tone faux fur stoles that topped many of the looks, or a dress whose back panel was an actual long sleeve T-shirt, so you could even tie the sleeves around the waist if you wanted. “One time I went to visit a girlfriend’s apartment and she was just piling things on the couch—there was a very nice cocktail dress but then also sweatshirts on top,” Li recalled. It was a funny little garment but also a very, very cool one.
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