With Burberry booming, designer in chief Christopher Bailey is feeling happy and he wants to share. So he flooded his spring catwalk with color: big juicy combinations of sky blue, grass green, sunshine yellow, blazing orange, and hot pink, with a lot of white as light relief. It was a dramatic shift from fall's decadent country-house party vibe. This time round, the rosy-cheeked, flaxen-haired Burberry boys had more-innocent pleasures in mind. In their rugby stripes, white cricket shoes, and college scarves and ties, they looked set for a punt on the river in Cambridge. All that was missing were the straw boaters, the kind of hats, in fact, that David Hockney, Bailey's color-worshipping inspiration for the collection, might once have sported.
But this being Burberry, that was hardly the whole story. The house's technical reach was obvious in natural fabrics pushed till they looked almost synthetic—a blazing-red coated-paper mac, for instance, or a fluorescent-green leather jacket lined in mesh like a nylon sailing windbreaker. Clever garment dying meant cotton and leather alike had an unusual brightness and softness. And while the fizzy parade of color combinations came close to Pop overload, any wardrobe will benefit from one scoop of Bailey's sorbet next spring.
