We’ve been assured that Burberry has climbed back into popular consciousness through its emphasis on roots: trench coats, checks, quirky outdoorsiness, maybe even the music festival thing last season which highlighted the essential Britishness of the brand. It seemed that Daniel Lee was successfully rising to the challenge posed to him by incoming CEO Josh Schulman to reverse the falling sales graph. Which is maybe why the designer felt free to take a different tack for Autumn/Winter 2026. Burberry came back to the city and went downtown, waaay downtown. Against the teeth-rattling sonic boom of fkaTwigs’s psychosexual soundtrack, I felt like I was eavesdropping on Daniel Lee introducing Patrick Bateman to Robert Mapplethorpe. Different city, obviously. Different decade. Maybe even different proclivities. But the ribbed white mohair knit, black leather pants and huge-lapelled shearling coat felt like the kind of update on Bateman’s look that director Luca Guadagnino might be looking for in his own incoming version of Bateman’s story. And that’s without the black leather jumpsuits, black leather greatcoats with nipped waists and Montana-esque shoulders, rough skins and shaggy patchworked hides which exalted animal instincts. There were leather snoods too.
Post-show, Lee talked about “celebrating what British life is like in the winter, which pretty much is living most of the time in the dark, in the bad weather.” Rain has been a constant in Burberry presentations over the years, but after something like 45 consecutive days of it, the cause for celebration would probably strike most Londoners as minimal at best, which maybe explained the gut darkness and doominess of Lee’s collection. I mean, who doesn’t feel like the state of the world right now is reason enough for bottomless despair? He would doubtless counter that. He claimed he worked in “a beautiful space with a massive skylight” so every day he enjoyed the rain. Perhaps the waterfall of fringes on glittering flapper dresses or the shower of sequins running down the leg of a pair of trousers were intended to be restorative.
Lee had another celebration in mind: London itself. Even then, the set — a looming Tower Bridge — had an ambiguous eerie quality, waxy, like a tourist version of the Bone Temple. We were in the building that used to house the Billingsgate fish market. I bet Jack the Ripper bought his kippers there. The best piece in the collection — a parka crazily embroidered with an A-Z of the City — actually was a celebration of London. In the same uplifting way that the first look on the catwalk — a trench coat with a ruffle collar — made you think for one mad moment that Lee was creating the kind of alluring hybrid between past and present that might signpost an even brighter future for Burberry. Which was the same way that Teyana Taylor’s maxi-ruffled, satiny, streaming trench/dress at the BAFTA’s spoke to a genuine glamour for a brand that has a sketchy track record with that particular challenge. Alas, there was no more of that, on Monday night at least.
