MORE EXPRESSION
LII — the three-year-old New York brand founded by Zane Li — caught everyone’s attention with its vibrant colours, unexpected constructions and seriously fun silhouettes.
Can we miss something we never knew?
That’s the question the 25-year-old designer asked himself while developing his Spring/Summer 2027 collection. Li moved from China to New York at 18 to study fashion, and just two years ago, presented his first runway show in the city. Now, after winning the 2026 Karl Lagerfeld Prize and being named a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist, he’s adding another layer to his minimalist expressionism.
NAÏVETÉ AND EXPERIENCE
Maybe he was onto something.
We become nostalgic for periods we never experienced. We recognise ourselves in people whose lives are completely removed from our own. Sometimes, we don’t even question how easily we can relate to something that technically has nothing to do with us.
And this is where the 1960s enter the picture.
Most of us weren’t there. But the codes of the era — youth, propriety, romance, teenage heartbreak — are still strangely familiar. Li looks at that distance between naïveté and experience, imagining what it means to feel nostalgic for something you only know through images, music and cultural memory.
The result is colourful, slightly surreal and deliberately youthful. Pops of bright colour, vinyl, mini dresses and almost spongy-looking fabrics bring a kind of childlike optimism that feels particularly good right now.
But the collection isn’t simply a 1960s revival.
Li pushes his familiar geometric language further, with a strong focus on panels, constructed shapes and the tension between girlhood and womanhood. Silhouettes that initially feel familiar are disrupted: deep V-necks appear at both the front and back, while T-shirts are layered and sliced apart, simultaneously covering and exposing the body.
FAMILIAR, BUT NOT QUITE
Li’s approach starts with shape. Simple geometric forms — squares, boxes and strips — are manipulated around the body until they become something less predictable. This season, those shapes appear across cocktail skirts, dresses and separates, creating volume and movement without losing the graphic quality that has become central to LII.
There’s also a sporty side to the collection. Shorts are constructed from stacked square panels, almost as if something has been caught between the legs, while askew tanks are layered over T-shirts and paired with colour-blocked skirts. Singular-leg “tights” made from sewn-together soccer socks add another playful interruption.
That tension between the familiar and the strange is probably what makes the collection work. If you showed these clothes to someone who knew absolutely nothing about the 1960s, they would still feel fresh. The references are there, but they’re not screaming for attention.
And they’re made to move. Even the most sculptural pieces retain a sense of ease, with the unexpected cuts and constructions becoming part of how the body moves through them.
The collection actually began with something much simpler: Brenda Lee’s 1960s ballad “Emotion.”
The song’s voice carries the emotional weight of someone much older — heartbreak, longing and resignation coming through a voice associated with youthful pop. That contradiction became the starting point for Li’s question: do you need to have lived something to understand it?
Maybe not.
We inherit emotions through songs, films, photographs and clothes. We build memories from things that happened before we were there. At some point, the real past and the version we’ve created in our heads become almost impossible to separate.
LII’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection sits exactly in that space — between something remembered and something imagined.
And perhaps that’s why all those bright colours, strange shapes and slightly ridiculous little twists feel so right. You don’t have to remember the 1960s to miss them.
