One of the many conversations around New York Fashion Week this season was about the ways this city can sometimes be inhospitable to the success of independent designers. Nevertheless, the young people for whom fashion is a singular obsession continue making their way here to bring their creative visions to life. Among the almost 100 shows, presentations, and appointments by established and emerging brands, we also checked out designer debuts. Although Fashion Week can be hectic and more than a little stressful, seeing an upstart designer whose strokes of brilliance are visible from the very beginning is one of the most exciting parts of our job. Below, meet four designers who we’ll be sure to keep our eye on these coming seasons.
LII’s Zane Li Wants Girls to Be Free
Zane Li graduated from FIT in 2023 and introduced his brand, named LII, by appointment at a small studio in Chinatown. Using a tightly edited and saturated color palette that included red, turquoise, blue, white, and black, Li presented a collection of deceptively simple deconstructed silhouettes in sturdy, technical fabrics that he pulled from his own closet, like heavy cotton twills and sporty nylons. “I feel like traditional womenswear fabrics are so precious—you’re scared about wrinkles and you have to think about specific occasions,” he said by way of an introduction. “I wanted to combine the ease of these fabrics with this sort of classic feminine, couture-y silhouettes that give girls the freedom to sit however they want and go to whichever occasions they want.”
Li plays with deconstruction and volume, but simplicity is at the core of his work. Take the humble T-shirt, which he reproduced two ways; a navy ringer “tee” which hits at the hip, is made from heavy cotton and fully lined so that it stands slightly away from the body; another is cut slightly more oversize and the shoulder seams are split open, which creates an effect akin to an unfinished ruffle. In white with red lining, it was particularly striking.
The designer also explored textures; a simple black shift dress had a panel of plastic affixed to the front, as if he had copy-then-pasted the pattern piece for the dress on top; while feathers made a surprising companion to colorblocked skirts in unexpected combinations like turquoise and red. His silhouettes are blown-up; they have structure and weight and yet they remain oddly romantic.—Laia Garcia-Furtado
Taottao Makes Anime Dreams Real
You’d never guess that Taottao’s flirty and fun collection, enlivened by skin reveals and heart-shaped insets, was designed by a self-described introvert, but it is. Yitao Li said she wants the clothes to talk so you don’t have to. For fall, she looked to video games, ’70s cartoons, and Neighborhood Story, her favorite anime, which inspired the toned-down palette. Her colored jeans were washed and hand-dyed in muted pink and pigeon gray, and fabric remnants were used for the plaid insets in the skirts.
After creating an ebullient 2021 graduation collection, this FIT alum worked in the city making custom designs, but realizing she couldn’t scale them, returned to China to work with local companies and do sourcing. (Taottao now operates between Jersey City and Shenzhen.) “I wanted to be able to make clothes with joy, and the simple pleasure that when you wear it, it takes you right back to when you were a child.”—Laird Borrelli-Persson
Colleen Allen’s Clothes Are a Ritual Process
For Colleen Allen, making her debut collection was a ritualistic experience. She said making clothes is about processing emotion. “It’s like a conjuring,” she said, “but it feels like it had to be done, I didn’t have a choice.”
The designer is a former Vogue staffer (she was a fashion assistant) who cut her teeth working on menswear at The Row. That she chose to pursue womenswear is the result of a series of considerations. On the practical side, the kind of formal menswear she likes to design requires resources outside of herself: “There’s space in women’s to be able to do this in my studio and with seamstresses and still get high quality results,” she said. More esoterically speaking, Allen found herself gravitating toward the idea of witches. “It’s how I arrived to and connected with the feminine.” There’s a humility to Allen’s clothes. Her tailoring is made out of technical fleece or velvet and dressier elements like a sharp bustled skirt are cut in simple cotton voiles and silk organzas—fabrics that have a “weakness” to them, as she put it.
“I taught myself to make things by taking things apart,” she said. This is why you’ll find that some jackets and skirts are lined or faced with muslin fabric, which is commonly used for mock-ups and samples. “I connect with womenswear that isn’t too precious or too finished, it feels more grounded when it’s undone.” Allen is fascinated by the process of clothes making, and likes to create pieces women won’t be “afraid to wear.” She has an obsession with collecting Victorian treasures, and her own love for clothing comes from “looking for identity in dressing.” She watched Poor Things, and though it wasn’t the impetus behind her collection, it is serendipitous. “I loved that it’s about a woman trying to figure out what being a woman is,” she said. Not unlike Bella Baxter, Allen is exploring her own relationship with femininity as she dives into womenswear head first. — José Criales-Unzueta
R4bbit Teeth Has No Bark, But Plenty of Bite
“Morbid cute” is how Jade To, a recent Parson’s grad, describes the hand-knit and “illustrated” felted pieces she produces under the name R4bbit Teeth. At first glance they look like something out of a fairytale—in fact the designer’s work grows out of her drawings and creative writing—but they speak about mortality, which the designer first encountered as a child in the form of a dead doe at the side of the road. Animals (rabbits, deer, lambs) and flowers are recurring and symbolic motifs in To’s work, which is also informed, she wrote in her artist’s statement, by “subcultural fashion, specifically gothic lolita, romantic goth, and cult party kei.” Her fall 2024 collection is centered around “antique toys: porcelain dolls, rag dolls, and the uncanny faces of the Rushton rabbit plush,” and again focuses on the clash between spooky and sweet. Over-collars with homely top-stitching details look like something out of The Scarlet Letter. To named a pearl button-front sweater the “intestine cardigan.” —LBP