Jackson Lewis Lee, 28, never imagined himself walking in a fashion show, much less a fashion show for a 123-year-old Ivy League clothier that’s taking place in a 121-year-old members-only club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Yet it’s here where Lee, the son of filmmaker Spike Lee and producer Tonya Lewis Lee, finds himself on a balmy morning on the first day of New York Fashion Week, about to make his catwalk debut for J. Press. (The show featured other notable model-personalities as well, including influencer Caroline Calloway, Black Ivy author Jason Jules, and menswear pundit Mordechai Rubenstein.) The label, founded on Yale’s campus in 1902, is about to present its first collection under its new creative director and president, Jack Carlson, who previously founded the pop-prep brand Rowing Blazers. The runway show is taking place at the headquarters of the Explorers Club (an institution “dedicated to the advancement of field exploration and scientific inquiry”), inside an impressively staunch Jacobean revival mansion that doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last half-century.
“This is the Explorers Club, so it’s all the old white men and they were like, ‘discovering America’ and all the other places,” Lee deadpans while we chat before the show. “So there’s a whole hall of white men upstairs, a bunch of dead animals from Africa everywhere, all dedicated to white men. Which honestly makes sense for a preppy fashion show.”
Lee was skeptical at first when a friend who works with the brand approached him to walk in the upper-crusty J. Press show, but then he considered his own prep-adjacent past.
“At first I didn’t see it, but then [I thought about how] I went to York Prep, which is a prep school in New York City. We had a uniform: khakis, polo with our school logo embroidered on it. So I understood it for the first half of my life. It felt very familiar. And then, you know, you go out in the world, meet some people that come from different backgrounds, and you’re like, ‘Oh wow, there’s a different way to do things.’”
When he’s not taking on modeling side quests, Lee runs his own production company and creative agency called Indigo212. “That’s my full-time job,” he says. He’s directed short films, worked with brands such as Rimowa and Nike, and designed several sneakers for Jordan. He’s also collaborated on projects with his sister, 30-year-old Satchel Lee.
Since Lee’s day job often means he interacts with the fashion world, he points out that he’s already seen the other side of what it takes to put together a NYFW-caliber event. But if he had to choose between working behind the scenes or modeling, he’d choose the former. “Honestly, I like the production side so much more,” he admits, though “it’s definitely cooler seeing it from this side and having no stake in it, and kind of just sitting back and watching it as a passenger.”
