For Zane Li, Being A Fashion Designer Is About More Than Clothes

We dialled in to see what the 2026 Karl Lagerfeld Prize win means for his brand LII. 

You’re in Paris as a 2026 LVMH Prize finalist, and have just won the Karl Lagerfeld Prize. What’s that like? For this year’s victor or the latter, Zane Li, “it feels surreal,” he tells journalists after winning via video call from Paris. “I feel like I'm in a really long jet-lagged dream that I don't ever want to wake up from.” 

Before he entered this sleep-deprived winning streak, Li founded his brand LII in New York in 2023. He moved to the Big Apple from China in 2019, enrolling in the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and started his own label after graduating. His work is an energetic blend of 1990s architectural minimalism, and pulsing colour palettes, centred around clothing worn on the daily. Take the colour-soaked, double-breasted raincoats, boxy polos, or collapsible rucksacks of his Spring/Summer 2027 menswear (only the second men’s offering since it was first introduced in January this year) collection as examples. 

This approach offers a unique perspective on versatile wardrobe components – the kind that make you feel assured in carrying out what you need to do and earn compliments from strangers in bars, but don’t require an art school degree to wrap your head around. And this reductionist mindset appears to set the brand up for success. “I think [I’ve had to] reduce non-commercial, non-sellable stuff because I feel fashion at the end is about merchandising. It's about what your yearly revenue [is] or how much [you] sell and the balance point that you're making that supports your next collection, your next runway show,” he says. At this point, he is trying to find the balance to eliminate overly imaginative designs and crazy material uses, and trying to contain that approach into a simple design mindset.

Courtesy of LII

For Li, being a designer in 2026 is about more than just making clothes. “It's more than a sewer. It's more than a pattern maker. You need to be a publicist. You need to be an interior designer, a content creator, a graphic designer. I do enjoy the complexity as well. So it's a job that [incorporates] with so many titles and words and doing,” he shares, ticking off the publicity part of things nicely. 

Winning the Karl Lagerfeld prize will see the 25-year-old awarded €200,000 as well as year-long mentorship from LVMH experts. Li was among the nine LVMH Prize finalists (which was awarded to Julie Kegels), judged by a blockbuster panel made up of Jonathan Anderson, Sarah Burton, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Nicolas Ghesquière, Stella McCartney, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Camille Miceli, Nigo, Phoebe Philo, Michael Rider and Pharrell Williams alongside Delphine Arnault, Pietro Beccari, Jean-Paul Claverie, and Sidney Toledano. Thai actress Urassaya Sperbund was also on the jury as a special guest. Think creative director Avengers, assembling at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Getting this kind of industry backing can transform the trajectory of a designer label, affording them the chance to invest in their operations, infrastructure, and receive valuable business coaching. 

What is Li going to do with the money? He’s going to put it into human resources first. At the time of writing, he is the company’s only full-time employee. The win will also allow him to focus on production and build out his direct-to-consumer operations, he explains to journalists, as well as exploring new fabrications and diving  deeper into accessories – new SKUs he didn’t have the budget to explore before. Reflecting on the experience, he highlights getting to know people he admires during the process and getting to speak with them. “The time of waiting is a practice [for] your patience as well. So it’s a really meaningful journey, and you get to learn a lot of things. And at the end, you get rewarded, so I can’t complain,” Li says.