Riccardo Tisci named his second collection for Burberry “Tempest,” which referred, per his press release, to “contrasts in British culture and weather.” The climate—both in political and environmental senses—is a hot-button subject in these stormy times for the U.K. Yet it’s Burberry’s role as a global brand to somehow project a positive message across markets and generations. Tisci’s intention, he said, is “including, not excluding.”
This time, he flipped the order of the show to begin with his proposals for youth—girls and boys—followed by new interpretations of the beige-based formalwear for grown-ups he’d begun in his first collection. Tisci’s affinity for streetwear is well known from his work at Givenchy. His viewpoint on British street style is filtered through his nostalgia for his experiences as an Italian fashion student at Central Saint Martins in the edgy heyday of ’90s music and club culture—but London now is a very different, and he thinks, “less free” place. “I observe a lot, now I am living here,” he said. Tisci drafted in MIA—who also studied at Central Saint Martins in the ’90s—to provide mashed-up soundscapes for the show: “She says the same things as me—that we need to help young people to have their voice.”
Tisci isn’t overtly a political animal, but past the opening of layered rugby shirts, some of his incitements for a new kind of youth style came with coded references to ’90s antiestablishment phases of rave and deconstruction. There were Vivienne Westwood–like corseted tops (she’s a heroine he’s already collaborated with) pulled on over a polo shirt, a stretch cycling dress, or tracksuit bottoms. Some of the boys’ bomber jackets and the girls’ dresses and coats were embedded with what looked like beer-bottle tops. A grunge moment came glammed up in sequined, corseted lingerie layered over a white T-shirt. There were upside-down attachments of padded jackets on tweed suits and camel Crombies—a chopped-up knack John Galliano brought to fashion back in the day. And was that a reverb of Oasis-versus-Blur Brit-pop style, when Tisci sent out a lad wearing a Union Jack flag billowing from the back of his black puffer coat?
The bourgeoisie half of the show read more as a pitch for the international elites of the world. The British aristocracy doesn’t really dress in spick-and-span skirt suits and neatly coordinated men’s tailoring. The truly posh stick to their more reserved inherited country-house modes of class distinction, although a black velvet skirt suit with a cream ruffled blouse and silk tie might win young royal favor at some point.
It’s a tense time in the U.K., and though Tisci ducked the inevitable backstage question about his position on Brexit with a noncommittal “Everyone has a different opinion,” there was an edgy atmosphere embedded in his presentation setup. Unbeknownst to the audience, Tisci had arranged it that half of the attendees had a very different experience of the show from the other. One of the presentation spaces in The Tanks at Tate Modern was a brutalist interior which was caged with steel scaffolding, over which dozens of kids, clad in generic tracksuits, shorts, and hoodies climbed and hung out as the show went on. The other half of the audience observed the show in a wood-clad auditorium with comfortable cream-cushioned seats with something akin to a luxury private cinema. Asked why the puzzling divide, Tisci merely shrugged, “But the models walked through both.”
