Zane Li has brought his menswear back to Paris ahead of his women’s show in New York next month. From a sleek showroom in the Marais, the designer explained how the season’s concept emerged from his longtime fascination with cars. Not their engineering or design, but a more contemplative relationship with them: observing life passing while traveling between studios and factories in China, or how a car’s speed makes it at once exhilarating (racing) and dangerous (the twisted scenes from David Cronenberg’s Crash). While nothing about the collection conjured that film’s auto-erotica, Li explained how all the allusions coalesced in the layering that made up each look.
“I was sitting in cars, and I would just have this feeling of people; there can be so many emotions, so many sensibilities of things happening inside of this steel frame. And the more time I spend in that kind of environment, the more I think about this combination of technology and desire,” he explained. “When I was designing the clothes, I was trying to figure out a second layer of clothing besides protection.”
His research led him to sport uniforms—specifically a vintage, two-tone F1 jacket with a high collar that shielded the neck. Iterations shifted from performance to streamlined style, from a chic cocoon silhouette to a multi-purpose blouson.
It’s one thing to be attuned to colors; Li also has a sharp eye for applying them, as with the turquoise placket unfurling down a black coat or how the solid blocks of green and red stood out like the shapes of an Ellsworth Kelly canvas. “I think color is like a broad language,” he said. “You don’t need to explain it; it’s just visual.”
With its turtlenecks, polos and crisp tailoring—all conducive to recombining—LII makes a confident bid for repping the new guard in American sportswear, and the designer noted how the brand builds upon ’90s-era codes established by the big three: Tommy (Hilfiger), Helmut (Lang) and Calvin (Klein). Li arrives to the scene with confidence and commitment. A more official presentation in Paris is one of many dreams, he said, sounding as though it may not be so distant on the horizon.
