It must have been the gloves. “If Patrick Bateman were a girl” is the phrase that popped into my head while watching Zane Li’s fall show—despite knowing that the banker-by-day was not the serial killer the designer had in mind. Rather, Under the Skin, a 2013 sci-fi thriller, in which the bad guy is a fur-wearing extraterrestrial woman, was the designer’s reference.
The only unsettling thing about this collection is how immensely talented Li is at just 25 years old. (He is a 2026 LVMH Prize semifinalist.) It’s essentialism that makes this designer a wunderkind. As the world that we have known slowly crumbles, Li is building something new through geometry, which you can see come alive through his designs. “It’s always about stripping down the functionality of cloth first. And then through exploration, you add other meanings to it,” said the designer. “It’s starting from reality, and then the whole process in between is very abstract and very—you don’t care about human, you don’t care about torso—it’s just all about pure exploration, lines and shapes, and then later comes the practical part. I think it’s a really interesting transformation.” What this man is able to do with a flat square is simply wondrous.
Much of the dimensionality in the collection was created by the seam extensions Li added to structured fabric cut flat and often color-blocked. Those flanges can flap free or be folded over to dramatic effect: See the waistline of the opening look or the pilgrim-style collar, which is contiguous with the body of the jacket, in Look 10. What keeps Li’s patternmaking skills from becoming too conceptual is his embrace of gorpcore. The designer’s use of sporty elements feels modern, especially in the Colorform color combinations he prefers. Beyond the active elements, it’s often possible to find couture touches (deliberate or not) in his collections. For fall he took on the cocktail dress. From the front, it looked like the models wearing them had stuck their arms through elegantly pleated pillowcases; the buttoning at the back recalled Christian Dior’s 1950 Oblique line.
Continuing his collaboration with Nike, Li showed black Air Force 1s with a square extension that flapped out from the heel. This was a reference to Under the Skin. Said Li: “Wherever the main character tries to trap a man, it’s in a really big black swimming pool.” The designer’s use of double air layer knits and thick but slick cottons with an almost shower curtain–like feel gave the collection an intriguing sense of sponginess. The springiness of these materials was more effective than the faux fur (another movie reference), which communicated an apt sense of savagery but looked tawdry next to finer, more firm-handed fabrics.
Li said he responded to the sense of outsiderness in Under the Skin, as a Chinese person in New York making American fashion, and as a young man attempting to design for women, which places him in the position of “interpreting all the stuff that you might not be familiar with or have actual experience of.” That’s where imagination comes in, and Li’s is taking us in exciting new directions.