Riccardo Tisci wants to bring all generations under the Burberry umbrella. “The mother and the daughter, the father and the son,” he said, after delivering his much-anticipated debut collection. He named it Kingdom: “It’s like a patchwork or a mix of the British lifestyle.”
There was no delay in getting out the message about Tisci’s vast overview. The three-part collection—sectioned under the headings Refined, Relaxed, and Evening—was streamed on Instagram. It was a massive show which presented his personal vision of the touchstones of British culture, from establishment to punk.
Tisci’s instinct as creative director, he said, is to restore an inclusive sense of balance to Burberry. It’s a vision which introduced eveningwear—seven long black jersey dresses, minimally edged with sparkle, which will have adult women lining up to buy them for events. He talked about seeing a need for “sophistication. I know we all talk about street, and I was one of the first, but,” he said, “we forget about sophisticated cut and Savile Row tailoring.”
It began—as it had to—with a trenchcoat, this one knee-length, buttoned up, and cinched with a broad elasticated belt. The belt read as a typically Tisci-esque shape-defining touch—his classic woman seen not as an all-over-the-place English eccentric, but as an adherent of neatness, pussycat bows, silk dresses—in the new Peter Saville–designed TB-logo-print pencil skirts, polo shirts, and piped blazers. Tisci said he’d been looking into the archive—this section, at a guess, must have been gleaned from the Thatcher-era ’80s, when Burberry catered for sensible, horsey women in the country. Head scarves were knotted as belts and became incorporated into the side seams of a raincoat.
Yet it’s been 20 years or more since Burberry was only concerned with serving the safe tastes of the British middle classes, and Tisci has been hired as a top-flight fashion titan whose tastes and skills are internationalist. His gloss on the look of the English bourgeoisie comes with a fashion accent—his tailored men, too, had close-to-the-torso suits and smart parkas which will be read as internationally “smart.”
Maybe Tisci was happier running free with ideas for the sons and daughters. There were loads: utility shirts, anoraks, sliced-short leather skirt suits, slicker macs and rain ponchos, a print—echoing a Sex Pistols song—reading “why did they kill Bambi?” In the end, there were 113 looks: It was a very big night out for British fashion.
