Well… that was quite the course correction.
After four whirlwind years under Italian designer Ricardo Tisci, a beleaguered and slightly out-of-practice Burberry has finally found something that looks like solid footing: embodied in the vision of Daniel Lee, the prodigious (yet controversial) Brit who, just days ago, took his first bow as Creative Director of the eponymous British fashion marque.
In what was widely touted as the most anticipated moment of London Fashion Week (Fall), the ex-Bottega Veneta honcho unveiled an Autumn/Winter collection that veered heavily into sunny-verging-on-blinding optimism: just the pick-me-up that British fashion needs following Brexit, Partygate and the threat of the country’s looming energy crisis.
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Granted, Lee’s inaugural creations for Burberry – replete with four-figure wraparound coats and graphic tees bearing child-like platitudes (“roses aren’t always red”) – are unlikely to salvage the failures of the British State; but are, at bare minimum, a reminder of capital-F fashion’s capacity for delight and distraction from the troubles of the day.
“I want it to be positive,” said Lee, in a post-show interview with The Cut – discussing his guiding ethos for Burberry AW23.
“To hopefully show some positivity about Britain to the world.”
Even if fashion’s illustrious pundits are yet to embrace this new, fuchsia-tinged vision with unreserved gusto – for what it’s worth, critic Cathy Horyn observed that the collection represented “a good start” for Lee’s tenure – you can be sure that reactions from shareholders will almost certainly be more rosy.
In a show ostensibly about clothes, Lee dispensed an almost equal number of accessories: novel designs that recall the formidable synthesis between commerce and creativity that the Yorkshireman achieved over the course of his four+ years at Bottega. Hilarious headgear, blankets enveloped in logos, hot-water-bottles-as-clutches and a range of cross-body carriers trimmed with faux fur all jockeyed for mental inventory with Lee’s clothes. Occasionally, they’d succeed too: but never at the permanent expense of the assembled outerwear.
In this brave new world of fashion-as-fragmentation, even a label like Burberry cannot survive on trench coats alone.
