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Since launching in 2023, New York-based Lii has fast become an industry darling. The sample requests come in hard and fast for magazine shoots, and the brand boasts a roster of famous faces including Greta Lee and Ayo Edebiri, thanks to stylist Danielle Goldberg.
But outside of the tight-knit fashion world, Lii is still relatively unknown — 24-year-old designer Zane Li is the first to admit. “The public is not that familiar with the brand, but we’ve gotten so much support from stylists, photographers, editors and magazines” he says. “I think things are marinating.”
Li is hoping that Tuesday’s runway show — the brand’s first — will change this fact. “The show is a perfect moment for us to present the clothes in movement, to show to a bigger audience,” he says. Even so, the young designer is keeping it small, with about 100 guests and in keeping with Lii’s ethos.
Lii’s entire brand rollout has been carefully curated. The brand showed on-schedule in 2024, by appointment. Its second collection was reviewed by Vogue Runway. Autumn/Winter 2025 was exclusively stocked on Ssense. The clothes have been featured in magazines from W to Harper’s Bazaar. It’s a distinctly fashiony approach in an age where brands often take off faster with viral stunts and Instagram-friendly aesthetics. Lii’s account, conversely, is made up of pared-back lookbook shots with a few magazine features sprinkled in, plus a save the date for Tuesday’s show.
Now, Lii is kicking things up a notch. This season in Paris, where Li was in town for pre-market sales, the brand operated with Clothes Agency, which works with brands including Wales Bonner and Courrèges on the agency side, and has New York’s Luar in its showroom. Sales were up fivefold, the brand says. Lii is doing regional exclusives with stores in different regions, including France, Italy and Japan. Hong Kong’s Joyce and Seoul’s Amomento are new stockists for SS26. And now, the brand is on the CFDA calendar for the first time.
With the runway show, Lii will build out its world — really, for the first time — beyond the clothes. “What I want to do is definitely beyond just patterning, just draping, just fabric choices,” he says. “I’m really into how music influences how the model walks down the runway; and how the audience sees a string of fabric, or how elastic swings in front of them; and then how the texture and the fabrics of the full look [juxtaposes] with the white wall or carpet.”
All of this, in turn, will impact how viewers consume the Lii woman. “[We want to show] what we want the Lii woman to look like in real life,” Li says.
This season’s collection explores how sound triggers memories. “I’m just trying to visualise that impression with different material choices, colour choices and then incorporating different archetypes of clothes, merging them into new modern silhouettes, and trying to imitate that impression of the sound space and its interaction with memory.” A mood board propped up against the wall shows a still from Jacques Tati’s Playtime (a nod to Li’s time in Paris?) and the film title design for Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. (It’s not the first collection to reference his movies.)
“That’s the thing about Zane is he’s never just been someone who’s obsessed with clothes,” says stylist Jason Rider, Li’s husband who jokingly describes himself as “the best PR intern”. “He’s way more into film and art and music — and the clothes are just a distillation of that.”
A New York brand
New York designers departing for Paris has become a well-worn path for those with big aspirations. Why did Li come back? “I studied here, we started the brand here. The first collection was launched here. The only reason we decided to do the showroom in Paris is because of sales; it’s out of practical reasons,” Li says. “I get all my inspiration from ’90s American sportswear.” New York is always the source of inspiration, from the movies it backdrops to the galleries that make up the city. “It’s happening here,” the designer says.
Now, Li has found a balance. The brand will continue to do pre-market sales in Paris, but he hopes to continue to show in New York. Practically speaking, it makes sense, too. The Paris calendar is crowded with luxury’s biggest names; independent stalwarts like The Row and Rick Owens; and an ever-increasing roster of British and American brands that make the jump. In New York, a tighter schedule means there’s more room to stand out.
In motion
Going from by-appointment showings to a runway show is a big jump. This season, Lii’s runway debut is in the company of brands like Diotima and Zankov, both of whom have shown in presentation format for many seasons.
With its first runway show, Li hopes to show the 360 version of Lii. This applies to the clothes themselves and the wider brand world. “The way I design clothes is that you [need to] see them from different perspectives, and you get totally different shapes from different angles,” Li says. “A show was an ideal way to present from the very beginning, but we’ve only got a chance right now because of the Nike partnership.”
Nike is sponsoring Lii’s first show, through a partnership that came to fruition fast. The sportswear giant reached out to the brand in June, when Li was contemplating what format to show this season in. “Li is one of the designers who reinterprets sportswear as a powerful language of self-expression,” says Lynne Bredfeldt Haider, Nike’s director of North America communications. “We believe in the ethos of the challenger spirit and to us, Lii represents that.”
It’s a vote of confidence for a brand that’s at the opposite end of the spectrum to Nike in terms of reach. “It’s really impressive if you think about the fact that this is such a small brand that only has like 5,000 followers,” Rider says. “We’re not in any way viral or doing anything super trendy. So I think it says a lot about them that they reached out to Zane and a lot about their instincts and how much they pay attention to things that are up and coming.”
Li feels that Nike is a good fit because of his take on sportswear. “They see how we incorporate active, sporty fabrics into evening gowns and how we merge casualness with formality,” he says. This is also why the designer was keen to make a few pieces out of Nike fabrics, rather than just sending models down the runway in Swooshed sneakers. (This season, Nike is providing footwear for Diotima, Kallmeyer and Agbobly as well as Lii.) Li told Nike the types of fabrics he wanted to work with; Nike sourced them; and Li designed and manufactured the garments — with the Swoosh, of course. For now, the pieces are just for runway, but Li is open to conversations about how to commercialise the partnership, he says.
Creativity and commerce
Lii was only able to put on the show thanks to the financial support from Nike. It’s a format Li hopes to continue as the brand grows — budget allowing. This balance of creativity and commerce is one Li is realising will characterise the label’s next phase.
“It’s a balance of commerciality and artisticness,” Li says. “You’re trying to present your best, but you also need to control your budget, save money for the production for the next season. It’s definitely beyond design. It’s a business; it’s a commercial practice. I keep saying that this isn’t what I signed up for.”
Li just wants to make clothes and put them on women (and men) he admires. Of course, he knows that to do so, running a business is very much what he signed up for. But this gets at the challenge emerging designers face time and time again when it comes time to grow their businesses: you can only be creative if you have the business structure to support those creative endeavours. Li understands this well, and his next strategic move will be to hire more people to help on the operational side, he says. Right now, it’s just Li, with Rider as an unofficial collaborator. “We’re just two people,” Li says, before Rider interjects that it’s actually “one and a quarter”. Rider’s styling day job keeps him otherwise occupied, though he helps out with sample coordination (and whatever else is needed). An email signed “Jason” from Lii’s press address is not uncommon.
Li is pragmatic. He doesn’t have lofty growth goals nor ambitions to scale at speed. “We’re not hoping for a giant expansion and we’re not trying to have this brand make a huge amount of money for us,” he says. “We just want to make enough for the production for the next season. And then maybe when the budget grows, we want to test out new materials and techniques. All we want is to have a bigger and bigger creative space.”
For this, Li is interrogating where and how his garments will show up in the real world, returning to the idea of the Lii woman. “We’re starting to think more and more what the garment means in real life, how people dress in certain ways,” Li says. “In the first season, we were thinking more on the fantasy side. But now we’re in our fourth season, we have feedback from real customers, from buyers, from editors.”
Li is balancing that feedback with his own design intuition to create pieces that women want to wear — and buy. “When the customer sees the clothes, I want them to have the same feeling as when they’ve seen a good movie.”
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