Dion Lee
Dion Lee collaborated with Rafael Bonachela on his work Emergence, that premiered in Sydney as part of De Novo in 2013.
Dion Lee has established himself as one of the most critically lauded and awarded fashion innovators to emerge from Australia in recent times. His status has been cemented by the international press with Fashion Wire Daily calling the designer’s premiere collection “the best debut by any designer on the planet this year”.
Lee’s first London Fashion Week show in September 2012 received a phenomenally positive response with Style.com commenting that “this collection was something of an engineering marvel, boasting three-dimensionally printed dresses and suits, the complex construction of which beggared the imagination”.
In addition to garnering recognition, Lee has also demonstrated considerable commercial nous, with the launch of Line II, a more accessible accompaniment to his main collections, focused primarily on shirting. The designer has also turned his hand to the high street, collaborating with respected Australian retailer Cue.
Taking an academic approach to the research and realisation of his work, Lee is consistently intrigued by the ideas of balance and contrast, particularly as they appear in chemistry, physiology and the creative arts. The result is clothing that takes a near-scientific mindfulness of the body, cutaways reveal shoulder blades or ribs, floating panels of silk chiffon offer a dramatic range of movement, whilst elsewhere in a garment tight, almost trussed tailoring might elicit a sense of restriction.
Lee’s extraordinary talent for patternmaking and his hands-on approach to collection development support his intricacy of vision. The designer’s skill is accompanied by an already established consistency of aesthetic season to season, which has made his rise, meteoric though it is, seem steady.
Having released just seven collections under his own name, Lee has already won Australia’s most prestigious fashion awards, including the QANTAS SOYA AWARD, the Prix de Marie Claire Emerging Designer Award and the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival Designer Award, Australia’s most prestigious emerging designer award.