As the UK’s only substantial luxurious participant, Burberry is the undisputed headline act of London vogue week. The soccer pitch-sized eight-mast tent that the brand name used two months erecting in east London’s Victoria Park is to London style 7 days what the Pyramid phase is to Glastonbury.
The strain on 38-year-previous Bradford-born designer Daniel Lee is extreme. Burberry not long ago issued a 2nd income warning in 3 months, and just after three seasons Lee’s tenure has reached the position wherever very little much less than a hit handbag will do. But regardless of a starry entrance row – Joanna Lumley radiant in ivory silk evening pyjamas, Barry Keoghan dapper in a polo neck sweater below a suit – and an all-star cast of British types like Naomi Campbell and Karen Elson, this collection felt a minimal lacklustre.
Inside, the tent was dimly lit, laid with smooth grass matting, and scented for the celebration with the fragrance Ivy by Perfumer H. “I required it to sense like a forest at night time,” Lee said following the autumn/winter season 2024 display. “A sensation of outdoorsy elegance, of comfort and heat.”
Lee’s huge plan for Burberry is to be an outdoorsy, all-weather conditions model. (He has swapped the white Porsche he drove when he was building in Milan for Bottega Veneta for a Land Rover.)
Consequently the tent. A Burberry exhibit is all about the coats, and right here they ended up rugged, with more parkas, duffels and discipline jackets. Trench coats had been intentionally crumpled, collars had been hoisted substantial versus the rain. Styles wore scarves wrapped about their hair, carried umbrellas and stomped the catwalk in toothy lug-soled boots. Smooth earth browns blended into mud-sodden greens. Even the crochet night gown worn by Campbell was influenced, Lee claimed, by moss.
Lee faces a hard job. Burberry is synonymous with Britishness all about the environment, and results is dependent on Lee defining a visual language for Burberry that represents Britishness in a way that is modern day and authentic, though newsworthy and fascinating, nevertheless continue to glamorous and aspirational.
“The curse and the beauty of this brand is that it appeals to a broad spectrum of people today, from football supporters to the royal family members,” he said. “But if you consider and you should everyone, you stop up pleasing no just one, and as a designer I have to have a stage of perspective. You just cannot just make a straightforward trench coat for good.”
No matter of dialogue is far more British than the weather and the wonderful outdoors has the advantage of becoming neutral territory in the British class procedure. Burberry has suffered in the previous from being observed either as also elitist or as downmarket, and Lee is canny ample not to decide a aspect.
“I’ve been considering about all the people who put on Burberry, and I imply from the explorers in the early times to my personal knowledge, which was substantially far more urban, of individuals in football grounds and in the pub putting on Burberry,” he claimed backstage.