Stately homes, the great weekend exodus from London, and a rainy walk through the muddy countryside. It’s fair to say that Daniel Lee has chosen to champion rather than denigrate universal clichés of Britishness when it comes to Burberry. As well he should – Burberry is kind of a cliché itself. It’s an outerwear provider, after all, and is there anything more stereotypically British than inclement weather? Certainly, there is no other fashion label globally that is so indelibly and singularly keyed to a national identity. Burberry is kind of a stately home itself – a grand English house, a great British institution.
Like its namesake founder Thomas Burberry – who, before the First World War, had opened up shop in Paris, Buenos Aires and the USA – Daniel Lee is canny in that he can embrace that identity rather than fight it, creating something that both resonates with a home audience and exports an unmistakable Britishness overseas. “We looked at tropes of classic British film and television,” he said, before his Autumn/Winter 2025 show. “Their deeply layered social observations.” So, in the halls of the Tate Britain – where over half a millennia of British creativity is cherished and championed – Lee proposed his own take on near 170 years of Burberry’s Britain, and portraits of its people.
It’s fair to say he pulled out all the stops for this offering – which amounted to his finest Burberry show to date. The Tate was hung with digitally reimagined country house tapestries, that also draped sofas and armchairs as if abandoned someplace dusty in a disused manor, while a fully-suited knight, like those that stand sentinel in regal entrance halls, also sat front-row. And across a carpet in Lee’s strident Knight Blue walked a cast of British characters that in themselves roamed through stage, screen and, occasionally, catwalk too. The models Naomi Campbell, Erin O’Connor and Edie Campbell were joined by actors up-and-coming and legendary, including Jason Isaacs, Richard E Grant, Jessica Madsen and Lesley Manville. “It’s through incredible actors, and the films and TV they’ve appeared in, that we learn so much about the rules of dressing up,” Lee said – fair enough, when his cast had also featured in the likes of Gosford Park, Bridgerton and The Crown.
But this collection wasn’t a costume drama, nor a museum (or, indeed, gallery) piece. Instead, there was a clever interplay between noble house and fashion house – literally as well as ideologically. “I was struck by the craftsmanship and those lavish fabrics and swatches of hand-painted wallpapers and of all the furnishing fabrics, handmade carpets and sumptuous, somewhat faded tapestries,” Lee said, calling his models “weekend escapees,” meaning day-trippers fleeing their lives to gawk at the splendour of a storied past. Isn’t escapism something everyone is hankering after right now?
Things escaped from those grand houses, too. Interior fabrics like lavishly figured and cut velvets were repurposed and reimagined as outerwear, while a colour palette of russet browns, yellows and greens evoked both the countryside and the faded grandeur of majestic yet gloomy interiors. And clothes were tailored with a swagger and verve, sweeping officer’s coats swinging around the body with a regal sense of pomp and circumstance, combined with the hunting, shooting and fishing garb of shearling-lined jackets, corduroys and, of course, hardy gabardines, as well as accessories in sturdy leather that winked to the saddlers.
Could we say Lee was looking at Britain’s checkered past? Maybe – it wasn’t a cynical dissection of British foibles (hey, we’ve voted in more Conservative governments that I’d like to admit), but there was certainly a revival of Burberry’s signature pattern, the one that was, in the past, often been snubbed as ‘Chav’ but that Lee first fell in love with in his debut collection. He’s paid a major part in its return to fashion favour – which this collection continues, the check here recoloured in subdued and subtle country shades, as if it had tumbled in the washing machine with the wrong set of sofa covers.
In all, the word to describe this collection was rich – in colour, in texture, most of all in scope. It showed Lee’s ambitions, and the depth and breadth of Burberry as a brand, its ability to express a multifaceted view of British culture. That’s pretty unique, too.
