Yang Li London

Born in Beijing, China, and raised there until he was 10, Yang Li then emigrated to Perth, Australia, where he lived until he was 20. Now 30, he has spent the last decade studying and later building his eponymous label from London, England – while showing his collections in Paris. “So although my ethnicity is Chinese and my birthplace is China, I also feel like a person who belongs to nowhere and who can belong to everywhere. I haven’t always felt this way in the past, but I’ve been very lucky to experience all the different cultures I have.”

Li’s uniquely globalised perspective, spiked with a personal propensity for dark and lyr ical romanticism, has enabled him to build a still niche but highly developed fashion identity. His clothes both for men and women are both ragged and formal, technical and organic, soft and severe.

A long-running collaboration with Austrian technical-wear specialist KTC has resulted in some of the most artistically interesting rain-repelling garments in recent menswear history. For the last few seasons, Li has been especially focused on allying his work with that of musicians he loves. He explains: “All fashion designers need a very intimate personal reference point to connect with the world, and music is the thing that’s most important to me. Plus, it’s closely linked to f ashion, because it’s an expression of attitude. And you can say that while fashion is attitude turned into form, music is attitude turned into sound.”

Li has long laboured to take off. He can be hard to read. But he merits serious attention. He is a fully fledged designer whose audience, surely, will find him. He says: “Fifty per cent of what we do is making clothes, and the other fifty per cent is making the world the clothes exist in – that to me is the difference between the garment industry and fashion. I see myself as more a storyteller than an engineer making clothes.The clothes are simply the main physical manifestation of an idea.”