Photography by Stefan Gosatti

Australia has seemingly been waiting for a long time for a designer that would call it’s own. Because the international fashion media have entirely focused on the immediate acclaim the Belgians have had, likewise with New York, Paris and London designers of Rodarte, Christopher Kane and Jeremy Laing to name a few. It has been the immediate gaze on one certain young designer who only just graduated last year from Sydney’s East Fashion Institute. And before you start studiously extracting the outwardly simple, complex shapes he has been able to create, this is someone who shows a modest personality, and we’re are beginning to be completely enthralled by the discipline he carries forth. Dion Lee approaches his fashion work as smart design and it comes to utterly no surprise why the extraordinary number of people that peered and whispered his name were surfacing his name alongside the definition of wunderkind. But as Alber Elbaz has said previously, it takes a little bit of intellectualism which can change the facade of fashion by adding rationality and realism to clothes. Dion Lee chose to stage his first runway collection show in Sydney’s Kings Cross district, down below a secluded underground carpark. What looked like an environment of being claustrophobic, suddenly dispersed when an architecturally sculpted collection walked down the sections of seats.

Prev Next

What Dion Lee pursued was an artist by the name of John Chamberlain, an American artist and sculptor whose work is carefully moulded together from old, rustic automatic metal, glass fragmented parts. When looking at his artworks when hung, there is a fixated de-constructed melange of burnt and faded industrial colour and an overall structure that is intangibly controlled. He could have referenced this elements literally just by having distressed, mish-mashed textural colours as fabric adornments on dresses of commercial value but it definitely was not the outcome. Intelligently, he approached a modern, loosely-structure skirt suit or some with the smoothest granery waist trousers paired with elongated spread collar top shirt or matching tank shirts. Sleeves were slashed panelled within jacket sleeve lengths and tectonically mapped like shoulders. Not forgetting that the female body has a front and a back, symmetrical zipped buttresses were well-grounded; slash cuff sleeves, a pure black deconstructed hauter dress and slick origami pleats and multiple folds in ice cream sleeveless dresses made this female almost artificial and defiant. But throughout the collection, the connection in this debut runway collection was completely anthropomorphic with the interplay of sheer silk and deep parabola necklines. Dion Lee for the seasons to come will be a definite newsmaker with every attention to detail he musters but the question is, will we be able to hold onto him when he peaks to the level of prowess and assertiveness, a matured designer grown into his own strengths and weaknesses if none at all?

To sum up, his complex minimalism of which we can deduce from his collection for Spring/Summer 2009 was that he was able to beautifully fold one fabric all the way around.