FEW designers have made as big an impact on the local industry as Dion Lee. The Sydney-based womenswear designer launched his namesake label, perhaps unwittingly, right out of college, and in terms of prestige, creativity and presentation, he has quickly surpassed his peers to establish a new benchmark for what Australian fashion - and, for that matter, fashion businesses anywhere - can be.
A good measure of a designer's innovation is the difficulty in describing their clothes and, in this case, it's hard to put your finger on what it is exactly 26-year-old Lee does. Architectural complexity often belies what appears at first glance to be a simply tailored garment, such as a pencil skirt, but this is not haute couture in the sense of how we imagine it.
"I find the question of my aesthetic surprisingly difficult to answer," explains Lee over coffee following Australian Fashion Week in April. "It's quite a technical aesthetic but sensual at the same time. I'm really interested in cut and construction and technique and fabric, but on the end-wearer the clothes have an ease that's very sexy and about the body, and I think a lot of that comes down to the Australian lifestyle.