If you were one of the local office workers taking an afternoon stroll along Piccadilly today, you may have noticed something out of the ordinary. Under the grand eaves of the covered shopping thoroughfare Burlington Arcade, attendants dressed in head-to-toe black were handing out copies of The Edeline Lee Times. If that faux Fleet Street title sounds unfamiliar, that’s because it wasn’t a newspaper at all; or rather, it was a mockup made by designer Edeline Lee to introduce her immersive presentation, which took place along the high-end boutiques of the arcade, and around the art world hub of Cork Street. (It also came at the end of a week of high theatrics in London this season, from Florence Pugh at Harris Reed and Sir Ian McKellen at S.S. Daley, to Richard Quinn’s crawling BDSM cats, and Di Petsa’s sage-burning rituals.)
Given Lee’s multitude of cultural interests—she noted that the process of essentially taking over a whole block of central London was smoothed by her preexisting relationships with some of the galleries, and past show collaborators including writer-comedian Sharon Horgan and London theater titan Josie Rourke—today’s event, directed by Zeina Durra, marked a return to her preferred method of showing. Still, as Lee notes, she’s never done anything quite on this scale before. “Everyone I’ve spoken to has said it’s cheered them up,” said Lee, laughing. “Which is exactly what I hoped for.”
If her objective was to bring a little mirth to an uncharacteristically sunny February afternoon in London, she certainly achieved it. Her own guest list mingled happily with curious members of the public, who gathered to watch the City of London School children’s choir sing an arrangement of a Chopin Mazurka in the shadow of the Royal Academy of Arts. (The melody was echoed by everyone from jazz musicians leaning out of the windows of the arcade, to flautists playing on the street, to a concert pianist tinkling ivories in a vacant gallery space.) Elsewhere, a model in a refined woolen trench coat dyed a rich, deep green handed out bushels of daisies and dahlias; others wrangled Dalmatians, leaned against a lamppost reading Virginia Woolf, stacked shopping bags into a vintage Mercedes, or sat on a throne-like chair to have their shoes shined—a cozily nostalgic vision of how a glamorous Londoner might live.
