Dion Lee could give you a million guesses as to the starting point for his new collection, and you’d still never get it. Correction: Maybe at, say, guess 476,892, you’d offer up “glass,” having spied the glass beads crocheted into some of Lee’s evening looks. Years of your life would have gone by, hazarding guesses, and you’d wind up wishing you’d paid attention to the damn glass beads—a straightforward clue—right off the bat. So, yeah, anyway, glass. But that’s the great thing about Dion Lee: His mind works in unexpected, indeed unexpectable, ways.
Aside from the beads, Lee abstracted his glass concept in a few different directions. His most inventive idea was to think about glass in terms of form, making garments of square sheets of material, like windowpanes, and then draping and pleating and cutting into the fabric to re-create, in three dimensions, the effect of reflection. The slashes and asymmetrical folds on numerous of Lee’s pieces did double-duty, thematically; of a blazer with cut-open sleeves, for instance, he explained that he was contemplating springtime, and playing with ways to make a tailored jacket jibe with that warming weather impulse to, in his words, “peel back the layers.” You could see a similar thinking at work in his fret-like lacing, a riff on the glass bead crochet. These were clothes with windows cracked to let in some air.
The thing is, these clothes needed some air. There was a certain monumentality to Lee’s offer here, and though his instinct to introduce improvisational gestures was correct, the effect was too often mannered as opposed to spontaneous. Lee did loosen the reins as he considered his window theme from another perspective, glossing not the glass itself but its frame. That idea came through most clearly in two of the collection’s most dressed-down looks, navy crepe pieces crisply edged in white. A pair of trousers, vaguely redolent of athletic tear-away pants, made for one of the standout pieces here, if only because their fluid silhouette made for a nice counterpoint to the showier sculptural clothes. This was one of those Dion Lee collections where the designer’s concept—and the formal play it inspired—had a somewhat stifling effect. You’d imagine a glass-inspired collection would be all about lightness, and in some ways, this one was. The palette, for instance, erred for the most part toward the bleached end of the spectrum. But too often here, the light was a grace note that served to underscore this collection’s sense of weight.
