Dana Lee Brown Is the Quiet Architect of Modern Cool

Once a leading voice in minimalist menswear, Dana Lee stepped away from fashion’s spotlight at the height of her influence. Now, she opens up about her creative path, her quiet departure, and what it means to build a life on her own terms.  

 

The relentless seasonality of the fashion industry drove Dana Lee away from it. But the possibility of breaking that cycle is what ultimately brought her back. The North Vancouver-born designer enjoyed more than 17 seasons crafting her namesake menswear brand Dana Lee (previously called A-Z Collection), which she founded in New York in 2008. A menswear collection that featured made-to-last essentials designed to eschew trends, the label grew a healthy following among men who had an eye for exquisite basics. “Lee’s eponymous brand catnipped men who were discovering the inherent pleasure of well-made clothing for the first time,” Highsnobiety summarized. Amid the buzz surrounding the Dana Lee brand, the designer decided to pull the plug, shuttering the line in 2016.

Between the ages of four and 10, Lee moved back and forth with her family between Vancouver and Prince George in northern British Columbia. She recalls many family conversations during her youth centring around the topic of design: her father was an architect and urban planner; her mother enjoyed sewing. Lee’s brother, Derek Lee, would also go on to work in design, becoming a celebrated principal landscape architect at PWL in Vancouver. Attending Kwantlen Polytechnic University for fashion design, she segued the early introduction to clothes-making provided by her mother into a formal education, graduating with a bachelor of design in fashion and technology. After university, Lee decamped from B.C.— “When I was young, I really wanted to leave Vancouver,” she says—moving to New York, where she would eventually start her first brand.

 

Dana Lee Brown is the Quiet Architect of Modern Cool

 

 

Eight years on, at the height of her influence, Lee wanted out, and she relocated to Los Angeles with her husband, Adrian, and welcomed two children. Lee recalls feeling that the closure of Dana Lee marked the end of her tenure in the clothing industry. But it wasn’t just juggling a new city and young family that prompted the decision to close down her brand. It was also the weight of the wholesale-focused fashion machine that emerged during the early and mid-aughts. “There was a lot of pressure to adhere to the fashion calendar, get a collection out every season,” she recalls, “just simply so you could have your products be sold by someone else.”

After selling off her remaining stock via an archive sale, she felt content to step away from the fashion world. “Probably five years went by just not really feeling too inspired about what to do,” Lee recounts. “And honestly, I wasn’t sure I would return to making clothing again.”

A few years on, she noted a shift in the fashion industry. Consumer consciousness and the evolution of direct-to-consumer e-commerce sales empowered small brands, ushering in a slower approach to fashion. “There’s this ability to create on your own schedule now, more than how it was before,” Lee says. “It’s one of the reasons why I felt comfortable getting back into this: just knowing that I could have some control over my timeline.”

Inspired by the growing movement toward transparency and traceability in general, Lee found herself examining the connection between fashion and food production. She became interested in how farming practices affect, both environmentally and socially, the way we live and, in turn, how we dress. “When you start looking at clothing, there is such a strong parallel, or there can be, between food,” Lee says. “Any clothing that’s made with natural fibres has to be grown by somebody. There is a direct impact on the soil. There’s a direct impact on the people who are working on those farms. There’s a direct impact on the cost of transportation. So it just made so much sense to start using food as a guide.”

 

 

Dana Lee Brown is the Quiet Architect of Modern Cool

 

The timing and shift in perspective also aligned with the pandemic, which saw many people questioning fast-fashion trends as they searched for both creative outlets and creatively crafted goods. Lee started thinking about how powerful it could be to connect people with the clothes in their closet in the same way that they were starting to connect with the food on their plates. “That was a realization,” she says, “that was really pivotal.”

That perspective of traceability and interconnectedness is a primary pillar of Lee’s latest clothing venture, Dana Lee Brown (Brown is her mother’s last name). Like the farm-to-table food movement’s emphasis on locality, organic growing, and high quality, Lee is taking a similar approach with this latest design endeavour. Referred to as “field-to-loom” clothing, Dana Lee Brown designs are created in close collaboration with the farms and mills that provide the fibres, which include cotton and wool, that make up the final garments. Lee works with a network of farms in places not immediately associated with textile production, such as Ontario, Northern California, and Texas. Each farm has a detailed write-up on her website. Materials such as organic cotton, Foxfibre (a naturally coloured cotton fibre), and sheep’s wool are used in Dana Lee Brown designs. Trims, twill tape, pocket lining, and other trappings, Lee points out, are also completely customized using North American materials and mills. “All of the materials are sourced either from the USA or Canada,” she says. These textile producers are part of a tight-knit group working to save—and hopefully, even grow—the industry in North America.

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Dana Lee Brown designs are timeless wardrobe essentials made from organic fibres, using natural dyes, and brought to life on Bowen Island, off the coast of West Vancouver.

 

Sourcing textiles from North America is extremely challenging, according to Lee, but she’s determined to find a way. “It can be done,” she says, “and it needs to be done.” But it’s an uphill battle. She guesses that, in the last two years, the community of textile makers in the USA and Canada has shrunk by about 20 mills. In the final five months of 2023 alone, a reported eight U.S. cotton mills closed down. By that same year, the number of Canadian textile mills had declined to 559 from 1,085 in 2006. “There is a real sense of urgency to push more work and bring more attention to local farmers and mills in the textile industry,” Lee says. “We have an urgent situation locally. And if we do want to have any sort of local textile supply chain, we really need to act now.”

 

 

Dana Lee Brown is the Quiet Architect of Modern Cool

Dana Lee Brown is the Quiet Architect of Modern Cool

 

Dana Lee Brown’s first pieces came out in January 2023. The current lineup includes staple items such as a cropped sweatshirt crafted from High Desert Wool Cloud Fleece that’s produced in West Texas, spun in Maine, and loomed in Quebec, and the straight-fit pull-on pants made using an innovative wool-hemp blend that’s sourced from California, spun in Maine or Italy, and loomed in Pennsylvania. “The style may be basic, but the fabric is very deep,” Lee says of her garments. “The quiet, more simple pieces are those that get worn the most.” Many of the fabrics, she proudly points out, are made just for her brand. Once a run of fabric is finished, it’s typically gone for a long time or, in certain cases, forever. An item like the Foxfibre striped shirt, for example, was created using a run of 200 metres of the unique material. When it sold out, it was gone for good. “I am able to offer something exclusive to my clients,” Lee says. “Not only is there some transparency to the fabrics and clothing, but there is also the chance to have something unique, as well.”

Dana Lee Brown collections lean into Lee’s lengthy background in menswear while also tapping into the longtime request from fans of her previous brand to offer designs that work for women too. “I am trying to expand into more of a gender-neutral territory,” she notes, adding that she’s encountered challenges with that approach. “In the beginning, I was trying to make styles that work more for male body types, but I find if you take a men’s style and put it on a female body, the lengths, specifically, can be really off.” Her solution to the sizing predicament has been to design from a masculine angle but then tailor the garment patterns to fit a female form.

 

 

 

A glance through Dana Lee Brown collections yields an immediate understanding that the pieces she has created are designed to be practical, and perhaps above all, lived in, both indoors and out. Lee now calls Bowen Island home, having left Los Angeles in 2018 to reconnect with the nature she grew up surrounded by in B.C. “There’s always this constant connection to nature, and I think it’s that sort of quiet, ongoing presence that does influence my work,” she says. The region’s affinity for casual, laid-back style also factors into her design approach. “People are dressing more for the weather and moving through the day comfortably,” she says. “I feel like that’s how we tend to dress living on the West Coast. And I think, growing up with that and being back in this environment again, I have that intuition and understanding of that type of dressing. It really allows me to create more versatile clothing, having lived that way.”

With such a streamlined selection of timeless wardrobe essentials, it’s easy to imagine that Lee lives in her own designs. When asked, she points to one key piece from the line that she reaches for repeatedly. “The wool sweatshirts, especially for this Northwest climate, are really something I wear a lot. Having that layer of wool on the inside, while the whole piece feels quite lightweight, adds a lot of insulation,” she says. “The sweatshirt gets a lot of wear.”

The comforting reliability of staple garments is a consistent theme found throughout Lee’s designs. It’s a common thread that will undoubtedly draw fans of her prior work in to her latest endeavour. But it is Lee’s commitment to the individual materials used in her latest collection that will render Dana Lee Brown designs all the more noteworthy—and delightful—to all.

 

 

Photographs Courtesy of Dana Lee Brown.

 

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