Haoran Li threw a party at Webster Hall to celebrate the Lunar New Year — guests arrived to boxes of Chinese food, the runway opened to the sounds of workers hammering steel while a train chugged its way into an EDM beat, and the collection that followed was as layered and culturally specific as the evening itself.

Li drew from two distinct but connected histories. The first was the 19th-century Chinese immigrants who built America’s first transcontinental railway — workers whose garments Li reinterpreted through the lens of updated American workwear. Cowboy-inspired button-downs and Americana hues flooded the collection: washed green, canary yellow, sandy brown. The shapes and references leaned into classic working-class American dress — Carhartt was explicitly on the mood board — but filtered through a Chinese-American lens that shifted their meaning entirely.

The second reference point was the economic boom of the 1980s, specifically the moment when avant-garde Asian designers began transforming Western fashion from the inside. A block-and-tackle suit was reimagined with padded shoulders on a powder blue work-shirt maxidress. A trucker jacket received a Chinese knot button — a small detail that carried the whole argument. “I think it’s what is American to me right now,” Li said. “Combinations and fusion of different cultures.”

The references remained fairly literal throughout, which was part of the point — this wasn’t a subtle exercise in cultural archaeology but a direct and celebratory statement about what America actually looks like when you account for all the people who built it. Li’s woman may not be working on the railroad, but she’ll be wearing that snap-button-filled red outfit to the club — which, in its own way, is exactly the kind of continuation the collection was arguing for.