Auspiciously, it was raining-yet-warmish when I arrived to see the Burberry pre-spring collection in its Paris showroom. “On days like this” grinned Daniel Lee, “when you don’t know what the weather’s going to do, these are the kind of clothes you want to wear.” At the end of May, exasperatingly, it’s barely stopped bucketing down over western Europe since January. On the up side, the drizzle and leaden clouds outside created a relatable backdrop for contextualizing the clothes and accessories—and yes, the trenches—that Lee’s designed to arrive in stores from October.
“Trans-seasonal, with a soft tactility” is something Lee said about the collection. “Everything has to look good on a hanger. Worth the money. Because ultimately we’re making expensive clothes we want people to want to wear for a very long time.”
And very relatable they turned out to be, both for women and men: a combo of coolly believable London styling and subtly tweaked country classics, filtered through Lee’s intelligent sense of applied fashion, and his fanatical eye for codes and details.
Let’s start with his patchwork peacoats, made in contrasting green-blue country tweeds, for both women and men. With the women’s look, there’s a beige-y gold minimal pie-frill collar on a Princess Diana-in-the-1980s cotton blouse. These two looks—as well as another mixed herringbone-pattern tailored coat with matching flares—jumped right out. There’s something hip and vaguely London to these pieces, but not so much that they’re fancy dress.
“It’s giving a modern spin on British tradition,” Lee remarked, while I hovered over an immaculately cut yet plain-seeming brown wool men’s blazer. It’s part of Burberry’s remit to serve men’s suits; Lee smartly pushes a sense of Savile Row restraint, but not in a conservative stuffed-shirt sort of way. “It’s a modern interpretation of what you think King Charles would wear,” remarked Lee off the cuff. Was he thinking of the Monarch’s love of gardening and the environment when he made another suit, in something that looked like beige gabardine, which has a green tufty pinstripe, as if grass was growing through it?
The surprising thing is also this: while Lee has set about making this collection in some senses look solid and traditional, in the hand it’s unexpectedly lightweight, even the leather and suede. “Because, even though we’re a British brand,” Lee observed, “predominantly we sell in hot places.”