Dion Lee is one of fashion s premier engineers, and the fact that he s constantly rethinking garment construction has made him one of the industry s most intriguing designers. Sometimes, though, his collections can be vexing—you sense that Lee s immersion in the technical has abstracted him from other fundamental considerations, like style and wearability.
This time out, he found a nice balance. His central ideas here were indeed formal ones: He was playing with gravity to create drape, and exploring the possibilities of bias-cutting, a technique he hadn t used until this season, remarkably enough. But those ideas were elaborated in accessible ways, as in the die-cut oversize mesh draped around a short evening dress, or the teal and black sheath composed of folded bias-cut satin ribbons. A lot of hard thought went into making those looks, but they came across as unmannered and easy to wear.
Lee also integrated his more innovative pieces into a collection full of fairly straightforward stuff—and as it turns out, he can do the straightforward stuff very, very well. His shirting was exceedingly crisp, the riffs on menswear tailoring super-sharp and smoking hot, and his outerwear was pretty much to die for. Best of all was an emerald mohair coat: No technical innovation was required, but striking the coat s tone of louche luxe entailed another kind of intelligence. There was emotion in these clothes—sensibility, if you will, as well as sense.
