Edeline Lee SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR Collection

Edeline Lee SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR

If you didn’t make a cake in lockdown, did you even really experience lockdown? Edeline Lee, formerly a baking novice, is a case in point: She perfected her icing technique to such a degree that a frosted exemplar appeared in the film she made to launch her spring collection. Intended as a “lighthearted” snapshot of the last six months, it depicts a young woman flitting around a room—dancing, reading, sleeping, arranging flowers, scooping icing absent-mindedly off that cake—in the kinds of polished pieces for which Lee has become known.

She screened it in a derelict, Grade II-listed Regency building in Marylebone, central London, along with a selection of models and a curation of exquisite antique Swedish furniture courtesy of the Stockholm-based gallery Modernity. It wasn’t as atmospheric, perhaps, as some of the experiential set-ups she has played with in the past. As she admits, “I love creating a different energy in the room, and you can control that environment physically but not in a film.” Still, combined with the peeling plaster of the high-ceilinged rooms, the ’50s Svenskt Tenn furniture, the smiling models, it felt like a sensible response to an LFW schedule that has been overshadowed by rising concern about a possible coronavirus second wave in the UK.

Also sensible: Lee’s decision to focus on core designs that have sustained her business up until now, produced in a factory in Yorkshire with fabric from Italy, France, and Switzerland. Lee makes clothes that are catnip to the professional working woman who doesn’t have the time to iron or color-coordinate her wardrobe, nor the inclination to skip lunch. Her best-selling Pina midi-dress has a ruched curve over the waist “so that you can eat without feeling uncomfortable,” as she puts it. No wonder the British superwoman financier Dame Helena Morrissey—a former City fund manager and mother-of-nine, highly regarded in the U.K. for having established the 30% Club, an initiative which aims to increase the representation of women on FTSE 100 company boards—is a fan of her crepe de chine, go-anywhere dresses. “I dress the kind of women who are always in front, speaking, leading things,” she says.

In service of those loyal clients who commissioned her when she started out as a “dressmaker,” in her words, the top floor of the presentation space was given over to key styles from her archive, in new colorways and fabrics. “Many of them come back every season for the same dress in a different color,” she says. And any of them would look pulled together in one of her fitted looks from this accomplished collection.

See every single look from Edeline Lee SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR Collection in the gallery, below :