“I think at Burberry there’s definitely a consciousness of what we put down the runway. We want it to feel like a dream, but we also want it to feel a real proposition for someone that wants to go there.” So said Daniel Lee this afternoon after his fourth runway show at British fashion’s tentpole house. Today Lee oversaw adjustments to both show format and collection emphasis that read as an implicit acknowledgement that Burberry needs to shift its pitch in order to right itself. Poor financial results (not to mention self-perpetuating, corrosive coverage of them) has also led to the recent introduction of New Yorker Joshua Schulman as CEO: today Burberry’s new white knight stood chivalrously at the door of the National Theatre to greet guests as they arrived.
The NT was Lee’s venue of choice because its Brutalist architecture synced with the Lee-requested, scrubs-blue, cut-out canvas installation by veteran Young British Artist Gary Hume (formerly twice a collection collaborator with Stella McCartney). It was also, however, a pragmatically modest space compared with the three big check tents that preceded it. The slimmed down crowd still featured a swathe of British talents—including Skepta, Jodie Turner-Smith, Declan Rice, Damon Albarn and many more—who sat on wire-meshed chairs that left an appropriately check impression.
We were presented with a collection that leant away from whimsy—no more duck hats, no more hot water bottles—in favour of a heightened focus on pragmatic merchandising. The storm flap, epaulettes, shoulder vent, Napoleon collar and belt of the house-archetype trench were intelligently applied across multiple garments including open-backed dresses, a popper-peppered twinset, and abbreviated, feather-collared jackets. The camel, red and black Burberry check was used most consistently as a detail on built-in belts, but also starred on a cropped duffel. In a series of men’s looks it was adapted into different varieties of check on attractive field jackets, half-zips and technical pants.
Bengal stripe shirts were given an impactful but easy-to-achieve elan with the addition of a matching silver-clipped smocked scarf at the neck. Coloured, washed leathers in Hume-ish matte pastels were crafted into fitted pants and cropped bikers. A washed floral ditsy print was used as an endearing substitute for camouflage on raincoats and tape-seamed combat pants. Low-rise front-seamed pants and shorts in denim or drill were given some sort of ruggedised protective treatment whose wash appealingly echoed that of the Hume canvas they were shown in front of. A tight formation of evening dresses in skeins of tinsel-toned sequins was on occasion framed by a tough leather parka.
Lee pulled a crest from Burberry’s jostling archive to apply as a patch on an attractively silhouetted pale denim men’s look near the end. This was a collection that subtly positioned itself as a potential torchbearer for not one but two heydays in Burberry’s history; the century-ago period of its original emergence (with Lord Kitchener as brand ambassador) and its two-decade past emergence as Britain’s only high fashion superbrand. As Lee noted backstage, that more recent chapter was spearheaded by an American CEO and a British designer. The winds of change are rising at Burberry once again.
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