In 2019, when Zane Li was 18 years old, he moved from his hometown, Chongqing, in central China, to New York, where he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was his first time in America, and he was excited to breathe the same air as his idols, designers such as Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein. But after just one semester, everything came to a screeching halt with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I had to take video courses about patternmaking, which was really odd,” recalls Li. Isolating in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, an ocean away from his family, he couldn’t go to campus, the Garment District, or, really, anywhere. “I’d finish my homework in two hours and spend the rest of the time researching,” he says. He…
