A bit of the magic was back at Burberry on Monday night. The British brand’s show at Tate Britain on the ultimate night of London Fashion Week had all the trappings of a major event. There was the swarm of fans behind the barricades, smartphones out. The superfluous number of black-suited staff thronging the steps and the front door. And there were celebrities, both among the guests seated on the dust sheet-covered sofas on the front row (Orlando Bloom, Nicholas Hoult) and on the catwalk itself (Richard E Grant walked, as did Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern and The Crown’s Lesley Manville).
Multiple trade outlets, including WWD, have reported that this show will be creative director Daniel Lee’s last. The company’s share price is down about 60 per cent since its peak in April 2023 amid falling sales, and Jonathan Akeroyd, the CEO who hired Lee, left last year.
But this did not feel like a final show for a parting designer — those are usually quiet, low-budget affairs, with no celebrities — though Lee himself declined to answer whether he is staying when asked backstage, saying only: “Josh [Schulman, Burberry’s CEO] has been here just over six months, it’s going really well, things are definitely improving.” A spokesperson for the company said it does not comment on speculation.
The grand British country house was Lee’s muse, and he dressed his models like a cast of Londoners decamping for a country weekend with their assorted walking clothes and flamboyant finery: an elegant brown check coat with a matching scarf; ribbed jodhpurs with square-toed boots cut above the knee; shiny quilted floral jackets with matching skirts; a pair of silk pyjamas under a green damask coat; party-ready trouser suits upholstered in green and mustard. The coats and the eveningwear were the winners, particularly the damask-print coats and dresses with their swishing fringe skirts and a glittering bronze dress, embroidered with black flowers, that set off model Karen Elson’s red hair beautifully. Shulman has said the brand needs to refocus on outerwear and scarves and Lee delivered that here.
It was a different approach for the designer — delivering, in Lee’s words, an “idyllic view of what Britain means in a global sense and how the world sees the UK”. The palette was still muddy, the loungewear tongue-in-cheek, but this was a more aspirational Burberry than he’d previously conjured up. There were no obvious hits among the accessories — certainly none to lift Burberry’s sales in a meaningful way — but for the brand it was a step in the right direction.
Burberry’s sales may be struggling, but the small, independent businesses that comprise much of the rest of the British fashion industry are struggling more. Last year’s closure of London-based online luxury etailer MatchesFashion — the store that lent the most support to young British brands by buying into their collections — has blighted the finances of up-and-coming talents. Add to this the consolidation of US department stores (and their less favourable payment terms), the challenge of turning ecommerce into a viable business and the ongoing headaches of Brexit, and it’s little wonder many designers opted to sit this London Fashion Week out.
But as Brits like to point out, the nation’s creative industries tend to thrive in times of economic hardship, and the fashion week schedule — though bereft of some if its promising young names — still packed a few punches. This was particularly true of the more seasoned designers who have their own stores and enough of a direct sales business to weather the decline of wholesale.
Simone Rocha alluded to her own staying power — her label is now 15 years old — by revisiting the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare”. Under the coffered gilt ceiling of Goldsmiths’ Livery Hall, models stepped out in sculpted black leather jackets with slashed sleeves and silver hardware, their toughness offset by delicate lingerie dresses, some transparent and crumpled, others in satiny florals dripping with ribbons. To this was added a wild, almost savage element in the form of faux hare fur, worked thickly into big coats and dresses with slit hems or draped like a sash over the hips of a black evening dress. Other models carried toy hares slung over their shoulders or clutched little ceramic tortoises to their breasts, the shapes of their shells echoed in a leather jacket and the draped back of a grey wool evening dress.
It was all recognisably Simone Rocha, yet nothing felt staid. “I feel that’s my role,” she said in a post-show interview, when asked how she kept her collections looking like her without looking the same. “After the show, I think about the next show straight away. And I want it to be different. It’s like going to the theatre — you don’t want to see the same play.”
Rocha’s aesthetic is singular enough to inspire devotion among her customers, and it is not unusual to see fans at fashion week wearing her creations head to toe (“It’s like a procession!” she enthused). But there were also pieces — pearl-drop hoop earrings, padlock belts, double-faced wool neckerchiefs and chunky lug-sole boots and brogues — that allow many more to dip their toe in, and the attention she lends to her accessories is another source of Rocha’s enduring appeal.
Erdem Moralıoğlu’s label is now in its 20th year, and though it must have been tempting to look backwards — he is an avid student of Cecil Beaton, the Bloomsbury set and other stylish luminaries of early-20th-century British life — this season’s inspiration was purely contemporary. In fact, Moralıoğlu conceded, to much laughter backstage, that it was his “first time making a collection about someone who was alive”.
Moralıoğlu had previously commissioned the painter Kaye Donachie, a fellow student at the Royal College of Art, to do a portrait of his late mother. He was drawn by her method of capturing the emotion, and not just the likeness, of the individuals she paints, and together they translated the cool, soft colours and watery lines of her oil paintings into dresses and coats with nipped-in waists and wide — sometimes caged — skirts.
Two hundred bits of organza were hand sewn to recreate one of Donachie’s preparatory paintings on the dress that opened the show; another dress, covered in a thick impasto of burgundy flowers, was achieved by “stretching out jersey, laser-cutting into it, embroidering it and then letting it shrink back”, Moralıoğlu said. It is not easy to make classically feminine silhouettes look modern without resorting to minimalism, but Moralıoğlu’s technically advanced fabrics and construction techniques achieved that here.
Emilia Wickstead, a designer known for her elegantly tailored bridal and eveningwear, faces a similar challenge with her 17-year-old label each season. And though she too stuck to archetypal feminine shapes — via Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and his de facto costume designer Edith Head — the sharpness of her lines, the restraint of her technicolour palette and the fast-paced energy of her show gave it a modern feel.
Models, emulating the constant movement of actress Tippi Hedren in the film, rushed past in crocodile-embossed leather coats and cuffed workwear trousers made formal in tailored wool, some clutching newspapers or leather gloves, the long collars of their brightly coloured shirts flapping like birds. These were clothes for women on the go, with meetings to make and the looming deadline of children’s bedtimes. The idea was ease: “We are a dressed-up brand,” said Wickstead post-show. “But here you can throw on a shirt with a leather skirt. It’s effortless but still put-together.”
And what of the next generation? Pauline Dujancourt, a finalist in last year’s elite LVMH Prize competition for young designers, made a promising catwalk debut with a grungy, sometimes ethereal array of asymmetrical sliced knits in mohair and alpaca teamed with billowing bubble skirts, and delicate dresses composed of strips of gauzy fabric. Later, a who’s who of the industry gathered in a cramped Clerkenwell pub for the sophomore outing of Paolo Carzana, whose hand-draped tatters of delicate fabrics dyed with turmeric, indigo and other plants and spices had a whiff of early John Galliano but were wholly unlike anything shown elsewhere at fashion week.
Carzana dyed the fabrics himself, and he was one of only a handful of designers who put sustainability at the forefront of their messaging this season. (Like streetwear, it appears sustainability was only a passing trend for fashion.) The other was Roksanda, who reworked sheets of neoprene left over from a previous collection into angular dresses and skirts and the electric-blue trim snaking down the front of a black sheath dress. The effort was welcome.
In a challenging market, designers might be forgiven for cutting a few corners. But Turkish-British designer Dilara Findikoglu, who counts Madonna and Charli XCX among her fans, went the other way. Her vampiresque corsets, laces and leathers were luxuriously textured and detailed. SS Daley’s generously cut duffel coats, quilted jackets and voluminous bubble-hem floral skirts also felt elevated, more grown-up. And thoroughly British.
The label’s designer, Steven Stokey-Daley, acknowledged that he’d been set back by the MatchesFashion closure; the retailer had launched his women’s collection. “The impact was huge,” he said. “The tough thing young designers face who aren’t bankrolled by mum and dad is cash flow. When something like MatchesFashion happens, it can really derail everything. It taught us not to put all our eggs in one basket, and I feel very lucky we started our ecommerce a few months before [because all the clothes they had ordered] had a place to go.” His young label promises to have staying power too.
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