Culture

This Fashion Week Collection Taps Brokeback Mountain for a Modern Take on the West


 

While many dream of warmer destinations to cure their winter woes, Victor Li’s interests lie in the country expanses that backdropped Brokeback Mountain. After revisiting the 2005 film during quarantine, the New York-based designer took a road trip to Wyoming in search of an adventure of his own.

In a press release, Li says the movie’s “sustained melancholy” led him to visit the state, whose orange cliffs, “idyllic yet lonesome” mountains, and vast blue sky seduced the designer, becoming the inspiration for his Fall 2021 collection, which debuted yesterday at New York Fashion Week.

Courtesy of Victor Li

Since its launch in 2019, Li’s eponymous fashion brand has served as something of a travel diary for the designer, and this season’s collection, “Suspension in Time,” reinterprets Wyoming’s landscape in a series of abstract pieces. Washed fabrics mimic the erosion of granite and sand. The West’s rigid mountaintops and wide-open skies manifest as juxtapositions between loose outlines and structured tailoring. Bolo ties and screen-printed horses feature throughout. But heavy denim seems to take center stage in Li’s imagination, a tough fabric reworked into streamlined, innovative tops, jackets, and bottoms with visible stitching. “I only wish that I was able to vividly translate the fond memories I had in Wyoming because they provided an escape during such a trying time,” Li told them.

This season stands out among the designer’s work for another reason: an added womenswear line. After studying menswear design at Parsons, Li started out with a special hand in men’s tailoring. “Since the very inception of my brand, my female friends have always sported my designs,” Li says. By branching into womenswear, Li is now able to blur gender lines in his work even more than he had before. “I used menswear fabrics as well as adapted silhouettes and tailoring elements from my men’s designs with an added feminine touch,” he told them. Below, check out more from Li’s F/W 2021 collection.

Courtesy of Victor Li
Courtesy of Victor Li
Courtesy of Victor Li

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