Werk-ing Girl | Edeline Lee

​​When the jewelry designer Cora Sheibani asked Edeline Lee to make some dresses that she could show her spring 2012 collection with, Lee didn’t think past the request. “I just made the clothes,” says the Vancouver-born, London-based designer. “I didn’t even think about production.” The women who saw Lee’s precise, softly geometric designs, however, had different ideas: she was flooded with requests for private orders, many of them from dealers, curators and others involved with the visual arts. “I think the people who respond to my clothes are people who are used to looking at things in that way,” Lee says. Those initial orders weren’t just encouraging, they were practical, providing Lee with the funding she needed to start her own line.Her first proper collection, for autumn 2012, was inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte, the turn-of-the-20th-century art, architecture and design movement that sought to recast daily life into a unified work of art — and it is a small, confident tour de force of taste and technique. Working in a tight palette of ivories, whites and blacks enlivened with blue, green and red, Lee has imbued even the simplest of her dozen pieces with the Werkstätte ethic of beauty buoyed by craft: the soft pleating of a cream-colored Grecian frock is anchored by an inner grosgrain belt that preserves its shape without interrupting its flow; a color-blocked white and black coat is given textural depth with a yoke made of raffia faux fur. It’s the work of a designer who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what clothes mean to women and what women need from their clothes. After completing a bachelor’s degree at McGill University (“my family wanted me to be a lawyer,” she says), Lee studied at Central St. Martins, where she interned with both Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. She dropped out to head up Zac Posen’s studio, then returned to St. Martins to finish her degree. After a stint working for The Rodnik Band, a conceptual British label, she intended to go out on her own, but life got in the way. “I got married, had a baby, got divorced,” she says. “As a woman and a designer, going through all these milestones has had a definite effect on my perspective. When I was younger, I was more fantasy driven. I’m more realistic now.”