Luck loves skill, hence seemingly by accident (but practically on merit), Edeline Lee has found herself a nice little niche. "Ninety percent of my clients are in the art world," she says, "directors, dealers…" That's a handy clientele to clothe—some gallerists take up to half in commission—and you can see why they want to hang Lee's pieces on themselves.
Especially fine were Lee's reversible piped-seamed boiled-wool coats, painted white or in tangerine. Light and bubbly neoprene mesh, crepe, and gabardine were the mixed materials of her astutely colored, adroitly draped, and sometimes tentatively asymmetrical Fall oeuvre. It was all good stuff. Which is why it frustrated this observer that Lee seemed so determined to stay within the boundaries of her chosen territory. This presentation was held at a lovely little private art space in Camden; as we moved through the tinkling branches of a Charles Avery tree and then on past a Lichtenstein, Lee explained she favors site-specific fashion installations. Nearby, an illustrator named Isobel Williams sketched her pieces in situ. Those arrows on Lee's collection were inspired by Keith Coventry—she phoned him to ask permission to homage him—and there's a Man Ray dress, too. Her press release quote was replete with just the type of hollow rhetoric that fills the introduction of coffee-table contemporary art books: "This season, I thought of the idea of creating a three-dimensional collage. The Edeline Lee woman and the collection pop ups and layers within the foreign space of the art gallery—in an exhibition whose very concept is about the blurred lines between subject and object, time and space." Oh, purleeze. Lee could so easily spread her wings and fly beyond the narrow constituency that pendulums via Art Basel, Frieze, and the Venice Biennale. These clothes were eminently as interesting and appealing as most of their accompanying artworks, lilies reduced only by their gilding.
