“It’s been a while now, yeah: three years. So versus everyone else, it’s one of the longest!” Daniel Lee laughs down the Zoom from the studio in Burberry’s Westminster headquarters from which he has creatively led Britain’s prime luxury fashion house since October 2022. It has taken Lee a while to find his stride, but now that he has, Burberry is on the up.
At Lee’s first show, in February 2023, he peppered his runway with band T-shirts, hot-water bottles, duck-bill hats and many more ephemeral gestures so quirky they sometimes felt borderline arbitrary. He honored the house he had just joined with plenty of checks across the collection, and referenced its canonical trench coat in about 20% of the looks. However, entirely understandably, Lee’s formula felt adapted from that with which he had found so much success—and four British Fashion Awards in one year alone—during his time at Bottega Veneta between 2018 and 2021.
If Lee’s earliest Burberry collections didn’t exactly make it rain at the house’s global network of 400-ish stores, that was in line with a broader malaise across the luxury fashion world. Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, however, Burberry embarked upon a process of constructive adaptation: it brought in new management in the form of seasoned American CEO Joshua Schulman, who devised a new strategy entitled Burberry Forward. While Schulman decreed wholesale changes under the bonnet of Burberry’s structural engine, plus a newly tight focus upon the house’s core heritage and identity, he kept faith with Lee. This meant that in 2025, when no fewer than 15 creative directors showed debut collections across the apex strata of fashion, Lee and Burberry were insulated from the drama.
Lee’s time at Burberry is now longer than he served at Bottega. That depth of relationship is bearing fruit commercially and creatively. Following Schulman’s rubric, his most recent collection, fall 2026, hewed much closer to Burberry’s core codes of internationally recognizable Britishness (Tower Bridge, partying, and puddles) as well as to the trench: around 60% of the looks in the collection contained a trench in some form. Yet despite that apparent simplification, the trenches themselves were in line with Lee’s exuberantly experimental creative urges; playful, ingenious, complex, and witty.
As the weather brightens for both Burberry and Lee, the house has entered the 170th anniversary of its foundativon by Thomas Burberry back in 1856. To mark the anniversary, Lee commissioned a campaign saturated with icons. Shot by Tim Walker it features 23 British and international luminaries drawn from the worlds of fashion, entertainment, and sport. All of them, naturally, are wearing Burberry’s famous trench coat. Vogue Runway connected with Lee shortly before his most recent show: below is an edited version of the conversation.
So it’s 170 years for Burberry and three years for Daniel Lee at Burberry: congratulations!
Daniel Lee: Thank you! The team that’s in place now feels really stable and it’s been a really solid period of work.
That came through in the most recent collection that pushed some core Burberry ideas in a very effective way. It always takes some experimentation to understand what is going to work, right?
I think so: how far you can push things, how far you can’t. Every brand is different, and has a different DNA and different values. And a brand as famous as Burberry means so much to so many people, so that’s also something to be aware of and to work with.
And now you are amplifying this big anniversary for the house.
I thought what better way to celebrate the 170th anniversary of the brand than to celebrate its most iconic product, which obviously is the trench coat. It’s a product that’s been around for a very long time and continues to be an enduring symbol of Burberry and also something that people embrace into their lives and into their wardrobes. It’s a garment that’s influenced fashion in a huge way, obviously in this brand but also on the high street. So we really wanted to celebrate this icon. We’ve called the campaign Portraits of an Icon because of the trench, but also we wanted to celebrate modern British and global icons too.
You’ve bagged some great talent, including Agyness Deyn and Kate Moss, who both mean so much to the house. It’s great to see Moss back in her trench, posing a little like Christine Keeler. There’s also the Arsenal superstar Eberechi Eze, Hikaru Utada, Jonathan Bailey, Kid Cudi, Kristin Scott Thomas, Matthew Macfadyen with a pigeon, Teyana Taylor…
It’s really about just embracing the person and the trench without any kind of noise or fluff. And I think the fact that we shot it on so many different types of people also really represents the trench. This garment is worn across different generations of people and by people with completely different lifestyles. That’s the point we really wanted to put across. And I think today when you communicate, the more stripped back you can be, and more direct in your message, the more it resonates.
This is a World Cup year, but I enjoy how dedicated Burberry has been for some time to inviting soccer players, especially Arsenal players, into its shows and campaigns.
Football is something that is super synonymous with Burberry. In fact, football was really the first way in which I experienced Burberry. Going to see Bradford City play with my dad when I was a kid, I would always see the Burberry check.
How has your understanding of the house deepened in your time here?
I think the more you know a brand, and the more you embrace a brand, the better the work is and the better it’s going to be in the future. I work with a very big team here, and there’s a lot of trust and respect between us. That’s what keeps you going. Our ambition here is to continue to celebrate the creativity at Burberry’s heart. We want to continue to cement Burberry as the ultimate luxury brand in the UK. We want to continue to celebrate British craftsmanship and the products that we create. Thomas Burberry’s founding principles were to create products that are enduring, that stand the test of time, and that will be part of people’s lives for a long time. Those are the principles we still follow today.
This article was first published on Vogue.com.
