KELSEY LEE

UNDERGROUND | Kelsey Lee is a Minnesota-based clothing designer with a focus on menswear. Her love of fashion started as a child through watching fashion shows and learning to sew and knit with her mom. Her dad always ensured that music was a big part of her life, which became a large inspiration of her aesthetic. Her menswear muses include The Beatles, David Bowie, and the more modern K-Pop boy groups, all fashion trendsetters of their time.

Kelsey is a strong proponent of the slow fashion movement and loves to add handmade elements to her designs. She finds value in the handcrafted, as opposed to the mass-produced, because the designer becomes a part of the object they are making, creating an emotional meaning beyond material.

Underground is a collection inspired by the motifs of consumerism and wastefulness carried throughout the Jim Henson movie Labyrinth. The main inspiration comes from a character who lives in a dump and literally wears all of her belongings on her back, most of which is just meaningless junk. These objects weigh her down, forcing her to live with the paranoia of losing them. Many of the textiles used in the collection were hand made using fabric scraps that Kelsey has collected over the years, things that most would consider garbage. She hopes to bring new life to these forgotten objects through this eclectic line using spinning, quilting, braiding, knitting, and latch hooking techniques, bringing refinement to the concept of wearing “garbage”.

CONTACT | kairi.lightning@gmail.com

WEBSITE | https://1004kl.com