15 July 2025 |
The Indigenous Australian designer is a rising new name to know.
In between all the major designer debuts, creative director swan songs and viral celebrity moments at Haute Couture week in Paris, there’s always space for rising new names to know. This season’s standout? Grace Lillian Lee, an Indigenous Australian designer based in Cairns, Far North Queensland. Uncompromising in every way, Lee’s work is brilliantly bright, chaotically colorful and full of over-the-top, sculptural texture, all woven by hand using a rare technique most of the world has never seen before.
In fact, the base of Lee’s designs is all about hand-weaving –a technique she learned from an elder when she was a child. “It’s usually a decorative ornament for ceremonies or just decoration in the house, so it’s not usually worn,” Lee says. Most of the village children learn how to do it when they’re young. While her ancestors used coconut palm fronds to create beautifully whimsical baskets, grasshoppers, and other objects, Lee flipped the script and uses contemporary fabrics to create spellbinding fashion with a dreamlike edge.
Even if you don’t know her name yet, Lee has already collaborated with Jean Paul Gaultier, who also made an appearance at her presentation. In 2024, Gaultier tapped her to design costumes for his Fashion Freak Show live performance in Australia. Prior to her haute couture debut, she studied design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and showed at Australian Fashion Week. The idea for this presentation was a well-timed coincidence as this summer, Lee begins a three month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, which perfectly coincides with the schedule. And being that her handmade work is all one-of-a-kind, it’s also a natural fit for a world, where all things handcrafted reign supreme.
And so, during the first day of the fall 2025 couture season, she showed her collection at an under-the-radar presentation on Rue Saint-Honoré, making for an incredibly powerful, emotional debut as the first Indigenous Australian designer to show at Paris couture week. Titled The Guardians, Lee described her new collection as “a tribute to my ancestors and a declaration of First Nations excellence on couture’s global stage.” She tells us, “the work is very colorful, and each color represents one of my ancestors. It’s a journey, it’s a love story.” Woven gowns in bright turquoise, vibrant orange, and hot pink floated across the venue’s floor, with matching sculptures hanging from the ceiling. The densely decorative dresses are the kind of work you have to look at two, three, or four times to see all the details with an unusual technique that’s something in between the world of pleating, sculpture and woven arts.
Lee’s work straddles the line between art and fashion and it’s easy to see why she’s hosted multiple gallery-esque exhibitions. “People say what I create is wearable art, and I don’t mind,” she says. “I really want to share this humble weaving technique that my ancestors have done for centuries, and for me, to show that I have evolved that into something that’s really beautiful and tactile and wearable and sculptural.”
And yet, even though she grew up in an area without a traditional fashion industry presence, Lee knew from an early age that she wanted to be a fashion designer. Raised in the era without social media, her entry to fashion was via encyclopedias, issues of National Geographic, and one particular fashion tome that cited Australia designers Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee, each who drew a lot of influence from our landscape of Australia. “I would create little design setups throughout my family home when I was a kid,” she recalls. “I had a studio in these unconventional spaces that didn’t really have space for me. I’d try to take over the house with my creativity. I would look at what people were wearing, and I would imagine deconstructing the fabrics that they were wearing into a whole other outfit.”
Lee called her couture event a “guerilla style” presentation, given it was off-schedule. That only added to the excitement however, especially in an era where the majority of brands are being led by male creative directors. Aside from running her made-to-order label, Lee is also the founder of a charity called First Nations Fashion + Design. “I’ve always had this sense of urgency and passion to create inspiration for the next generation, to really believe in themselves that we can be self-determined and independent,” she says. “I think for us as First Nations people, we really want to see more representation and ourselves being on these big stages.”
