Burberry held its show in the vaulted Victorian ironwork hall at Olympia, a London venue that must have been constructed around the time that Thomas Burberry began his company. As a huge publicly traded corporation operating globally, it is now stepping up efforts to do better with its carbon footprint, stating not only that the show venue was “certified sustainable” but also that the company is investing in “carbon offsetting” initiatives with regenerative agriculture and agroforestry in Australia via Pur Projet (whose work can be read up on the charity’s website.)
The idea that today a fashion company is thinking about taking responsibility for something happening on the other side of the world perhaps isn’t so strange—we all live on the same planet. Riccardo Tisci also shared his ideas about global influences in his collection, talking about how he’d lived in India and learned meditation in a phase of his life after studying in multicultural London at Central Saint Martins and before he started his own label in Italy.
There was certainly something calmer about the presentation, compared to Tisci’s more frenetic efforts to cover every age and class segment at his debut. “I think it was much more together this time,” he said. It’s a leap to connect a British lifestyle brand designed by an Italian amid Brexit politics, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised that his government will bring people together and look outward to opportunities on continents beyond Europe as it stands alone on the world stage. India, for example, is a major target for new trade.
If Burberry is contributing to modernizing the world’s impression of Britishness, the staid image of an English gent in a trench coat and a rolled umbrella with a headscarf-wearing lady from the shires is thankfully long gone. What Tisci serves is sophisticated tailoring (this season sometimes inset with zones of ribbed knit) and innovation in the form of cuts and details like looped collars on trenches and double-layered coats. There was a woman’s trench with a trailing chiffon sash instead of a regular belt and outerwear softened by caped shapes; and for a man a generous oversized inside-out duffle coat.
The Indian influence was felt when Tisci sent out a group of pleated madras checks, making a comparison of a kind with the Burberry plaid. A section of layered and hip-knotted shirts led into the “street” section of the collection for men. Even here, the impression was much less bombastic and branded than it was a couple of years back, as Tisci deconstructed rugby shirts, making one into a knit poncho.
As for evening—a category Tisci has built for the brand—he showed chain mail and glinting crystal fringe on the one hand but also some much easier dresses. He put his best friend Mariacarla Boscono in a flowing black Empire-line pleated satin with delicate chiffon sleeves. It had a sensitivity rarely seen from either Tisci or Burberry.
As a next step toward doing the right thing, it would be good to understand more about what Burberry is using as fabric content, where it sources the clothes we see up there on the catwalk. A company as huge as this one can have a major influence, leading the way for others.
