Australian designer Dion Lee – Portrait: Nick Hudson
Dion Lee is building an incredibly strong foundation and with the guidance also from Holly Garber his press representative international waters are the bridging discourse for a defined language of Fashion Dion is creating for himself. When during last year, spending time at his Sydney based studio and home in inner-city Newtown, the upstairs airy loft with a vast central monolithic table held opened tiered pages of which could be best described as peering into the notion of body mechanics, structural dynamics of architecture and Japanese design. How could this mechanical engineering be translated into female garments? Whilst he counts for the women who he likes to wear his clothes as, “strong, self-confidence and reassured”, that part of his brand’s DNA is left untouched. As seen from last season, the tonal angular slashing of sleeves in jackets, formulative folded panels on front of dresses and bespoke glass jewelry were semiotics that could emphasise the female aspect of his clothes, as until the woman wears the garment. Whether it is the psychological reason for constructing his garments so meticulously (as a male-led designer), he peers as through tailoring and re-contextualising the modern day dress by deconstructing it and leaving it in its purest form, Dion Lee strives for immediacy in his technical detail and handcrafted work. He is set on achieving a duality of lightness and skin transparency as similarly how architecture and Fashion have come to adorn the human body’s habitat.
At the heart of his work, this sense of industrialised evocation was imploded onto a series of accompanying dress garments that were built on a singular form. Tied coats and tapered trousers in purple violet and black remodelled to be less structured and the impolsion of Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots that gave his short sleeved shift dresses a colourful magnetisation. He even for one example, inverted the details of a jacket and recreated into a short wrapped skirt. But these minute details weren’t to restrict the free-flowing emotions of the woman he sees. As a design crescendo, concertina pleated skirts and swan like knotted vortexes were twisted to resulting in elegant symmetry. As of late, the fetishised design by shoemakers has given a swansong to women further emphasising their entanglement with Fashion. As such, Dion Lee grew crystals which than were moulded as the heels of his ankle shoes.
Panels of honeycombed patterns were sewn onto the black linear dresses and triangular metal pieces were attached to buttoned white shirts. One wonders if his malleable construction communicates a femme fetale warrior? Because as the sleeked white hair suggested, this aren’t ordinary women and certainly for the Rorschach inkblots that transmogrify into truly autonomous pieces.
Entangling and inevitable signals have cornerstoned Dion Lee as a promised child of Australia’s new generation of fashion designers looking beyond the clichéd wearability of clothes. His drive if one can commit to closely connects to British designer Louise Goldin’s working process and so Dion could be moving sprightly into the next level of a triumphant full-tiered collection.
