“It was really me, aged 15” laughed Christopher Bailey as he was being body-hugged and kissed by friends and well wishers at the end of a show that was the grand finale of his 17 years at Burberry. In so many ways, it was the most autobiographical and heartfelt collection of his career—an honest, symbolic revisiting of the place of his first fashion awakening, a dive club in a basement in Halifax, Yorkshire, and all the DIY teen-tribe styles that rolled through British street culture in the ’80s and ’90s. Of course, Bailey said it with music, too. What more perfect an opening anthem could there be than “Smalltown Boy,” the Bronski Beat hit from 1984, sung by the gay working-class pop hero Jimmy Somerville?
Bailey named the collection Time: It was “about the past, present, and future” of Burberry. And indeed, it was funny to contemplate how time has collapsed, bathing all the underground provincial style memories of Bailey’s generation in the limelight of fashion relevance to today’s boys and girls. In a brilliant twist, he brought back the licensing part of Burberry’s ’80s past the company had tried to bury and celebrated it, rereleasing a capsule collection of sweatshirts, checked bucket hats, and baseball caps. That was mixed in with shell-suits, the references to market-stall knockoff Burberry of London logo sweatshirts, and cheap licensed silk scarf prints: all peak fashion again. Ditto, the oversize raver parkas, the grunge-tribute fleece hoodies (amplified as real shearling fleece) worn over long skirts, and so on, and so on.
For all those reasons, it felt less like morbid nostalgia than outright celebration. For a man who has often spoken about being driven to make Burberry a “democratic” brand, and who’s now lived to see all the things that a working-class, homosexual boy like him would once have been bullied or looked down on for brought out in the open, accepted and admired? Amazing. That is surely why Bailey chose to wave farewell to Burberry in the way he did: with a collection full of the symbolism of gay pride and with a large donation to youth charities that support LGBTQ+ rights and mental health. There were rainbows everywhere: on bags, painted on skirts, on trainers and hats. Finally, there was Cara Delevingne, triumphantly swirling a floor-length shearling cloak pieced in all the colors of the rainbow. And when Bailey stepped out to take his bow, it was exactly at the moment when the lyrics of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” had reached the line, “Set me free.” Timing is everything.
