Move over Apprentice bodycon – this is what soft power dressing looks like now (and it's British)

Telegraph

21-02-2025

You may not know Edeline Lee's name – yet – but you'll recognise some of the many women who wear her clothes. Christy Turlington, the Princess of Wales, Amy Adams and Gillian Anderson are just the headline names.
Alicia Vikander used to trek to Edeline's big old Victorian East End studio when she lived in London and hadn't yet signed a lucrative contract to wear Louis Vuitton.
Although tomorrow's show at the Dorchester Hotel is tiny compared with her first one last September – just 50 guests – the Lee army is swelling in size, especially after last season's splash. That was the one at which a certain Lady Starmer appeared in the front row in an Edeline Lee polka-dot two piece
The Labour Party was already in the midst of clothes-gate and accusations that the Starmers, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner had all accepted thousands of pounds of free clothes in donations from Lord Alli.
Starmer had been wearing Lee for several years to key public events, but the timing meant this outfit blew up for the Starmers, although it was a blessing, albeit arguably a mixed one, for Lee. The pictures appeared everywhere.
The thing is, there are plenty of other women apart from Victoria Starmer, who rely on Lee to make them look and feel polished. As well as being interesting individually, they're notably eclectic.
From city financiers (Dame Helena Morrissey, the Tory peer) to academics (Mary Beard) art world (Melanie Clore and Manuela Wirth), culture writers (Nancy Durrant) actresses (Hayley Atwell, Sandra Oh, Olivia Williams and Saskia Reeves from Slow Horses) ceramicists (Deborah Brett) restaurant critics (Grace Dent), lawyers (Baroness Fiona Shackleton).
Even some of the Silicone Valley female tribe wear her. 'The men may be in fleeces there, but the women like to show up,' says Lee.
Glamorous and gravitas are no longer mutually exclusive and Lee taps directly into that intersection. Part of her wide appeal is that she's extremely pernickety about fit and cut. It takes a lot of blood and sweat to reduce clothes to this degree of simplicity.'Truth to tell, I think it's harder than doing complicated,' she says.
Whether it's the 'Pedernal' dress that's been in every one of her collections since 2018 (named for the mountain in New Mexico that obsessed Georgia O'Keefe and which the artist painted over and over again) or the inverted pleated 'Plait' skirt that the Princess of Wales has worn repeatedly, Lee's clothes help women to feel subtly powerful without resorting to the cliches of ultra high heels or restrictive silhouettes.
The Pedernal is rapidly becoming a symbol of soft power – just as Roland Mouret's Galaxy dress came to represent sexy power in 2006.
I scoot one over my shoulders when I visit her studio in Limehouse in East London to do this interview three weeks before her latest show. It wasn't meant to be a shopping trip and dresses are not what I'm instinctively drawn to. But it would be remiss not to thoroughly investigate.
Lee always exhorts visitors to try on as much as possible, taking copious notes, in her white lab technician's coat, of the way her clothes fit a multitude of shapes and sizes.
She's the antithesis of a designer who only wants to dress size 4 women.
The Pedernal is gorgeous on and strikingly lightweight (one of her trademarks is a sort of bubble textured jacquard that comes in different colours each season) and has none of the constricting stretch of those early and mid-Noughties power clothes. So far so good, although I'm self-conscious about my thighs and, sad but true, have been since I was about 12.
'So is absolutely every woman I've ever talked to,' says Lee. 'When it comes down to it, whatever field we're working in, women have very similar issues and needs. We need to be visible and upfront, and we don't necessarily want to be showy, or reveal lots of flesh.'
She spends months perfecting her silhouettes and fabrics, repeatedly returning to a design, like O'Keefe and her Pedernal paintings – so that women can accessorise them with classic courts or trainers.
Impressively, everything, apart from her newly launched shoe line which is manufactured in Italy, is made and dyed in London, here, where her studio and home is (she lives above the shop), which means she can constantly tweak, quality check, and make more or less to order, resulting in little to zero waste.
Designs are not discarded after one season. The Pedernal first found life in 2018. 'I never want women to feel they can't wear something they bought three years ago because it's out of date. I don't think these clothes will because they're based on ideas about proportion and lines and that never looks old. The idea is that you find your favourites and add one or two new bits now and then'.
Eventually, women get to know the clothes so well they buy multiples of the same thing and wear them as they would jeans or T-shirts. 'Some of my best clients I don't even see any more. They just email me their orders'. That includes women in Palm Beach who normally wear Carolina Herrera of Oscar de la Renta (this is Melania Land) but who love Edeline Lee because of how well it packs.
Effectively as the Pedernal slims and curves, it's the Plait trousers I want, want, want. As well as being elegant and elongating, they're different enough from every other pair to be striking but not outlandish. You could team them with a cotton shirt or one of her eye-catching tops for a sleek head-to-toe look.
I can see how women get hooked on her clothes. They're so carefully thought out, from the lengths (there are four) and all the other measurements that spark off them. She can give anyone a waist – and more importantly, the confidence to show it.
We trot upstairs to her flat to escape the bustle of the workrooms downstairs where they're working round the clock in shifts to get everything ready in time for the show, as well as the orders that go out to Harrods and various stores around the world (she recently launched a children's line) .
The first thing I notice in her sitting room is that all the books on her shelves are laid horizontally with their spines to the wall. I'm intrigued. How on earth does she find what she wants to read? 'They're all listed according to country of origin,' she explains. This is Alice in Wonderland logic. Country of author, or of subject matter? And how does she remember? 'I just do,' she says. 'When I was studying at college and we lived in dorms, people would constantly be judging what was on your shelves'.
That would have been when she was at McGill in her native Canada. Lee was a bookworm and highly academic. 'My parents were classic Korean immigrants who really didn't think fashion was an appropriate career for their daughter,' she laughs. Her father, who worked in property, struck a deal with his daughter.
If she could secure a place to study law, he'd back her in fashion. But to get on a law course in Canada, you have to study another subject first. So she read sociology and Asian studies: a four year course which she completed in three, spending her spare time making costumes for university drama productions.
Studies done, law course assured, she beelined for Central St Martins in London, interning at Dior and Alexander McQueen before dropping out for a paid job in New York for Zac Posen (now busy resurrecting Gap and Old Navy). 'My tutors told me I'd regret not completing the course, and in the end, I did'.
She returned to London to finish it, married, had a son (now 16) and set up a business almost without intending to. 'It was all word of mouth to begin with. I'd make a dress, then use that money to make another. The first designs were definitely a labour of love' she laughs. 'I think they each had 20 metres of silk'.
She learnt to be more practical, cut her own patterns out of necessity and absorbed all kinds of tricks to ensure her clothes became as hard-working as she was.
The 'Telluride' skirt, another favourite in her collections, comes with contrasting buttons to make it easier to mix and match it with a contrast colour. White-edged, buckled belts with visible metal work are another signature. 'It's graphic and fresh and provides two focal points to match accessories to,' she explains.
For years she didn't do shows, preferring to make experimental videos and drop-in events. One featured models in black versions of the collection introducing 'real' women in coloured replicas, demonstrating how different the same design looks in different shades. We thought people would pop by for ten minutes but a lot stayed for the whole two hours'.
She gets a huge buzz from dressing three generations of the same family, seeing the different ways women style her clothes, from edgy to classic. The business is growing, but this is not an easy time to be selling clothes.
'Sometimes it seems you're battling on all fronts, ' she says. She deserves to flourish. A quiet original, she provides something useful and deceptively simple that's very hard to do.
In an era when women's clothes are often oversized and masculine, or cartoonishly vampy, she delivers a female take on female curves.
'I think we can be completely comfortable in what we wear while celebrating our femininity, ' she says, ' that is a superpower'