Georgia Could Jagger has modified out of the stripy sweater she was sporting when she arrived at a photograph studio in north London, and is now in a sheer black gown with spectacular silver disco heels. The British Korean mannequin Sang Woo Kim is topless. And Daniel Lee, the 38-year-old designer who took the helm of Burberry in 2022, exhibits off his spectacular weapons with a waistcoat slung over his bare torso.
Welcome to the newest stage of the Burberry reboot. Lee’s second present for the model—which passed off final September in a tent in Highbury Fields, a park near Lee’s home in north London—concluded with a bare-chested male mannequin striding down the runway. So is intercourse an essential ingredient of his imaginative and prescient? “I feel intercourse is essential for everybody,” Lee replies. “I wish to put on garments, I wish to put on vogue, and I prefer it to make me really feel assured that I look good. In order that’s the mantra that I take into account once I’m designing. Folks wish to look scorching.”
But past injecting intercourse into Burberry, Lee has a higher mission. The fashions on these pages exemplify what he’s making an attempt to do with the model—to make it symbolize Twenty first-century Britishness at its most interesting and inventive: eccentric, inclusive, open to all types of influences, however underpinned by custom. “Burberry is a nationwide establishment; it’s virtually greater than vogue in the way in which that it’s all the time been there,” Lee says of the enduring firm, which was based in 1856. “Folks felt unhappy when the Queen died as a result of she was somebody they’d all the time recognized. Burberry has been round for longer than any of our lifetimes. These sorts of establishments give consolation.”
Lee’s sense of who ought to symbolize this new route appears half instinctive, half strategic. Take only a few of the fashions he’s at the moment obsessive about: “Georgia is all about London cool,” he says. “Jean Campbell grew up within the Scottish Highlands, and clearly the plaid and examine is a good a part of the Burberry story. We’re capturing Neelam Gill, an Indian British mannequin who began her profession at Burberry with Christopher Bailey”—the model’s designer from 2001 to 2018—“so it’s good for us to come back full circle. Equipment Butler is somebody I’ve labored with because the first present. I don’t need the folks we work with to alter each season. Let’s construct a household, so that folks see these faces and affiliate them with the model.”
Lee’s Burberry “household” encompasses way more than fashions, nevertheless. At breakneck pace, he has banded collectively an entire cultural neighborhood behind the equestrian knight brand he has newly revived, incorporating artists, soccer gamers (Tottenham Hotspur’s Son Heung-min is a model ambassador, and Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka fashions in its new marketing campaign), and particularly musicians. His most up-to-date present was attended by grime pioneers Kano and D Double E, avant-pop star Shygirl, and younger rappers M Huncho and Slew, alongside legends akin to Neneh Cherry; Damon Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz; and drum and bass godfather Goldie. The soundtracks for the exhibits have been moody affairs created by the likes of Burial and Dean Blunt, and supposed, Lee says, to in some way sonically sum up the U.Okay.
The designer is personally a fan of hip-hop, grime, and Afrobeats. “Music expertise is without doubt one of the finest issues exported from this nation,” he says, including that there’s nonetheless nobody who can flip vogue right into a full-on cultural phenomenon like a rock (or rap, or grime) star. “Musicians put themselves on present,” Lee says. “Their personalities are actually seen in the way in which that they gown, greater than in some other artwork type.” He will get notably excited when musicians put on his garments, as the way in which they fashion them is so sudden. “That surprises me and the workforce, after which we’ll be impressed to provide you with a brand new thought.”
An hour after he’s been photographed, Lee sits on a settee in an infinite, empty, and moderately chilly attic room on the studio. He has become inexperienced trousers, a chunky black leather-based jacket, and a high unzipped to disclose a easy expanse of his chest. He likes going to the fitness center: “You positively really feel a direct relationship between what you place in and what you get out, which is the alternative of our work.” Style, he implies, is a way more capricious beast than train.
Lee was born in a city referred to as Bradford, within the north of England, to an workplace employee mom and a mechanic father. His brother is a plumber, and his sister is a nurse who works within the accident and emergency unit. “Fairly an intense job,” the soft-spoken designer says with deliberate understatement. Obsessive about vogue magazines rising up, he studied at Central Saint Martins artwork faculty in London. Then, after interning underneath Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga (the place he used to like pulling all-nighters—“I didn’t wish to go dwelling whereas they had been nonetheless there”), he labored with Phoebe Philo at Céline, rising to move of ready-to-wear. He was comparatively nameless till he landed the highest job at Bottega Veneta in 2018, and accepts that now, at Burberry, he’s the general public face of the label. He now not drives a white Porsche, his firm automobile at Bottega Veneta, and is now discovered behind the wheel of a Land Rover, which, he says, chuckling, is “extra on model.”
That model, in fact, was constructed on essentially the most quintessential of British staples: the trenchcoat. In 1879, Thomas Burberry invented a weatherproofing cotton cloth—gabardine—which meant that raincoats now not wanted to be rubberized and could possibly be breathable. Britain’s Warfare Workplace was impressed by the coats, which had been initially worn by officers. They exploded in recognition and purchased Hollywood’s seal of approval in 1942, when Humphrey Bogart sported one in Casablanca—the primary of an extended line of display appearances, together with in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Wall Avenue.
However how do you reinvent such a well-known staple? “It’s not simple,” Lee says. “I feel some issues simply should be saved valuable. Clearly, you’ll be able to play with silhouette, with type, with quantity, in order that’s what we’ve accomplished. Folks know Burberry largely for the trenchcoat, and second is the examine celebrated in a lot of the scarves, so I feel the undertaking now’s to speak this concept of recent Britishness and to construct product that sits across the trench and the headband. So, what would you may have beneath the coat? What’s the shoe? What’s the bag?”
In terms of footwear and baggage, Lee actually has excelled. His pouches and boots turned Bottega Veneta into one of many hottest labels on the planet, earlier than he abruptly departed in 2021. The next yr, he was appointed at Burberry, changing Ricardo Tisci, whose tenure on the U.Okay.’s solely true luxurious vogue model by no means totally jelled. Burberry has declared its want to extend gross sales from $3.5 billion to $5 billion nicely earlier than the top of the last decade, and as an equipment maestro, Lee would appear nicely positioned to make that occur. “There’s no iconic bag that folks have related to Burberry earlier than,” he muses. (Let’s not even point out the “ludicrously capacious” pre-Lee design lambasted by Tom Wambsgans within the last season of Succession.) “I don’t suppose Burberry is essentially often called an equipment model at this time, so it’s an thrilling problem as a result of it’s a clean slate.”
Lee additionally needs Burberry to be a part of excessive tradition. The corporate will proceed its sponsorship of the British pavilion on the Venice Biennale, which this yr will showcase the work of John Akomfrah, whose most well-known piece, The Unfinished Dialog, is a three-screen video set up concerning the late cultural theorist Stuart Corridor. Burberry additionally sponsored the current retrospective by rambunctious artwork star Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain, close to its Westminster headquarters, and hosted a dinner for her at London’s quintessential artwork restaurant, St. John. The visitor record was one other index of the names Lee needs to symbolize Burberry, from actors Barry Keoghan and Micheal Ward to mannequin Adwoa Aboah. “Britishness is made up of so many alternative influences,” he says. “Take into consideration Jamaica and India and Nigeria, all these influences when it comes to meals, when it comes to music.”
Whether or not Britishness is a very alluring and salable high quality post-Brexit is one other matter. The prevailing temper within the nation is exhaustion, with a cost-of-living disaster hitting all however the superwealthy, an overarching concern that establishments such because the Nationwide Well being Service are crumbling, and fury at a interval of political turbulence finest summed up by the truth that the U.Okay. has had 5 prime ministers since 2016. The day after I meet Lee, the distinguished Turner Prize is awarded to the artist Jesse Darling, whose successful set up depicts Britain as a teetering rubbish heap of bent crash limitations, ratty strings of flags, and a maypole swathed in police tape. Nonetheless, when artists akin to Lucas, Albarn, and Goldie first shot to fame, within the mid-’90s, Britain was on the finish of an extended interval of Conservative authorities, financial stagnation, and cultural doldrums. “Cool Britannia”—the explosion of creativity embodied by artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin; bands akin to Pulp, Blur, and Oasis; and actors like Ewan McGregor and Jude Legislation—was across the nook. It’s not vastly far-fetched to hope that the nation is likely to be at the same stage now, simply when Lee is harnessing its finest skills.
There are different parts of the British character that Burberry needs to faucet into, Lee says, akin to greasy-spoon cafés: The tiny scrambled egg purveyor Norman’s, in a far-flung a part of north London, was just lately redecorated by the model, a undertaking that concerned overlaying the curtains in Lee’s “knight blue” examine and serving breakfast on plates with the home’s brand. The nationwide love of the nice outside in defiance of the largely horrible climate is exemplified by Burberry’s harder baggage and, in fact, the trenchcoat. Lee referenced the famously dry British humorousness with knitted duck hats in his debut assortment. “I like the truth that folks on this nation don’t take themselves too critically,” he says. “It’s good to introduce humorous moments within the garments. For me, in the end, vogue is leisure—it’s joyful.” There was additionally the bombastic takeover of Bond Avenue throughout London Style Week, when the model changed the indicators on the Tube station entrance and platforms with blue ones studying “Burberry Avenue.” “It prompted a little bit of a stir,” Lee says. “You’ve obtained to be provocative.”
For Lee, moments like that, geared for social media, are a manner that folks can really feel concerned with the label with out essentially having to purchase something—he’s conscious that his costs, which have risen in order that Burberry is on par with its luxurious rivals, put the garments out of attain for the sort of vogue fan he was rising up in Bradford. On the time, he was obsessive about vogue imagery however was actually “not a luxurious shopper.” Nonetheless, he believes that Burberry has a broad, cross-sectional enchantment. The faces of his first season’s advert marketing campaign ranged from Oasis scion Lennon Gallagher, 24, to the actor Vanessa Redgrave, 87. “For me, Vanessa virtually represents the royal household,” Lee says of the previous parliamentary candidate for the Employees Revolutionary Occasion. “Vanessa’s obtained a really spunky character—she’s very outspoken and comes from a time when folks weren’t afraid to say what they thought. She’s clearly a really gifted actress, a nationwide treasure, and really lovely.”
After the W shoot, Lee will transfer immediately on to his spring promoting marketing campaign. Picture making, he says, is one in all his favourite issues concerning the job. “If you take a look at a picture, you enable your thoughts to dream—you invent a narrative,” he says. The story of his Burberry continues to be in its opening chapter. “It’s solely been a month since we’ve had an honest quantity of my product in shops,” he says. He’s eagerly consuming the gross sales information he’s receiving about which items are connecting with the general public: “Oh, that is what persons are enthusiastic about, okay. That offers me a place to begin, and I can work round new variations.” As Britain makes an attempt to shake off its malaise, hopefully Lee can rebrand a renewed nation too. It’d even begin to look scorching.
Hair by Claire Grech for Oribe at Streeters; make-up by Miranda Joyce for Clé de Peau at Streeters. Set design by Amy Stickland at Second Identify Company. Casting by DM Casting.
Fashions: Equipment Butler at Subsequent Fashions, Alva Claire at IMG, Georgia Could Jagger at Tess Administration, Kai-Isaiah Jamal at Elite, Sacha Quenby at Squad Administration, Liberty Ross, Ned Sims on the Good Journal, Stevie Sims at Kate Moss Company, Sang Woo Kim at Lumien Inventive. Casting assistants: Brandon Contreras, Evagria Sergeeva; produced by Alex Bassford at Farago Initiatives; manufacturing coordinators: Keri Hannah-Pettigrew, Phoebe Bunje; photograph assistants: Alessandro Tranchini, Daiki Tajima; digital technician: Mattia Pasin; vogue assistants: Julia Veitch, Ella McKiernan, Ned Sims; manufacturing assistants: Hugh Stewart, Austeja Cheg, Paulina Dodot; hair assistants: Valentina Ingrosso, Kreszend Sackey, Lachlan Mackie, Charles Stanley; braider: Bianca Porter; make-up assistants: Hannah Mastreanzi, Rocio Cuenca, Zahra Redgrave; set assistant: Matty Mancy Jones; tailor: Lina Krukauskaite.