Could Daniel Lee be Burberry’s knight in shining armor, after all? Following last season’s quieter show—a lull in part ascribable to the moment of executive change with which it coincided—Britain’s blue chip luxury brand went full throttle again tonight. Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries jostled with a blockbuster curation of celebrities classic and emerging, homegrown and global, and both as models and audience. Yet hype, wherever it is generated, can only propel fashion’s business so far: the product itself must also fire desire to ignite performance.
Lee painted his collection in multiple commercial categories framed within a compelling fashion fantasy. That fantasy, he said backstage, had grown from a viewing of Saltburn.“I really enjoyed the characters, and how the people lived in this old incredible mansion house, and dressed in a really eccentric way for dinner, and had crazy parties,” he said. “The whole thing was super twisted. And this kind of bohemian spirit was the kind of energy that we wanted to portray in the show.” From Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey via Gosford Park and Bridgerton, that Tatler narrative is globally recognizable, distinctly British, and undeniably glamorous. This rendered it perfect Burberry material.
Lee approached it by applying country decor to Burberry’s house codes. Quilted coats and skirts came dappled in a darkly chintzy, shine-finish floral. Smock dresses and narrow double-breasted suiting were cut in wallpaper-adjacent jewel-toned patterned damask velvets. Knit dresses shook with massive fringed reefs of twisted yarn in looks that were half shagpile, half English sheepdog. Tapestry tops portrayed rural scenes, hunting scenes, and a valiant knight laying into a dragon. The house trench was cut in a floral ikat-esque print and then fringed as finely as a curtain tassel.
Elsewhere, Lee approached country classics through a house lens and applied multiple twists. In menswear, the pulsating silk robes and pajamas of Jermyn Street’s canonical outfitters were translated into louchely seigneurial daywear: jacquard pajama suits and wool overcoats with knitted shawl collars. Womenswear saw jodhpurs layered between riding boots and tough leather bikers or richly dyed shearling bombers with mega-fringing. Parkas were cut oversized and in leather. Cropped trench jackets in leather were hand-tooled with more decorative florals. Checks were balanced, featuring on footwear, a very horse trials pleated skirt, and in some softly contrasting and softly tailored opening outerwear pieces. Crucially, the looks that furnished Lee’s country house contained multiple pieces that you could see being extracted from the runway and placed convincingly on the street.
“Things are definitely improving, and I think we’re all in a really positive place,” said Lee of his company’s much-scrutinized business performance. Sinead O’Connor dominated the soundtrack, singing on “Troy,” “You will rise, You’ll return. The phoenix from the flame.”
Creativity in design has become a questionably disposable commodity at so many buffeted-in-business fashion houses lately. This Burberry collection demonstrated the virtues of weathering the storm.