Women’s fashion has a sizing problem, says designer Edeline Lee. She’s out to fix it
Edeline Lee, who has dressed Kate Middleton, says women don’t fit into five sizes and suggesting they do ‘doesn’t help with insecurities’
We tend to assume that it is fashion designers who perpetuate the tyranny of the size-six silhouette: the rail-thin runway model, small sample sizes and the implied suggestion that women must shrink themselves to fit the clothes.
“Women don’t fit into five sizes – it’s complete b******t,” she says, with the matter-of-factness of someone who has seen, up close, just how untrue the fantasy really is.
Speaking from her East London studio, where clients regularly strip down to their underwear during fittings, Lee says she hears the private fears and body anxieties that women carry every single day.
“If you get naked with someone, basically it’s a very intimate experience … you end up having these conversations.”
And those conversations make clear that the idea of a single “ideal” body remains deeply embedded in luxury fashion, even if the public conversation suggests otherwise.
“It’s not [like] the industry [is] saying as a whole, we only believe in skinny teenagers,” Lee stresses.