Inside Daniel Lee’s Burberry Debut, London Fashion Week’s Biggest Show

When Burberry announced the appointment of Daniel Lee as creative director last September, the rumor mill went into overdrive. This was the man who had transformed Bottega Veneta from an insider’s luxury brand to an outsider’s hype beacon. What would he do in the tallest, oldest building in the high castle of British fashion?

He’s still big on renovating, for one. Before any actual clothes had hit rails, Riccardo Tisci’s modernist sans serif Burberry was replaced by Lee’s more traditional, slightly village-y Burberry, with its neat edges and modest flicks. With it came the return of the 122-year-old “Equestrian Knight” logo: an armored cavalier jousting on horseback with the word “Prorsum”—Latin for “forward”—held aloft on a spearhead banner. The coinciding campaign was understated: Shygirl smized through rose-lacquered acrylics; John Glacier sauntered in front of Big Ben; Vanessa Redgrave was shot, mid-shriek, in Trafalgar Square (yes, in a trench). It said nothing and yet so much. This was cool, and eccentric, and diverse, and evasive—all adjectives worn with pride not just by British fashion, but British people.

Tonight, the palace intrigue was put to rest—for a few hours, anyway—at Lee’s first-ever Burberry show. The pews were full: Stormzy, Jason Statham, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Jodie Comer and Naomi Campbell, among many others, were there. And despite the endless back-channelling of information that may or may not be true, fashion’s talking heads were still at a loss as to what to expect from the new Burberry. Few (if any) estimates were on the money.

Ki Price

Held in Kennington Park, Lee’s show added another demographic to the enclave just south of Westminster. Joining the usual residents—Londoners, politicians and reformed party boys—were the fashion crowd, who snaked in long queues behind barriers well past the 8pm on the show’s invite. Another surprise: this isn’t a fashion-y part of the capital. That’s perhaps the point. 

The temporary venue was lit only by waifish spotlights, and cushioned by tartan picnic blankets. Upon those sat complimentary hot water bottles jacketed in the house check. There was a faint smell of campfire and bracken in the air. Accents of electric blue were flecked throughout the space, too: a suggestion that Burberry had found its house color—an important distinction to make among the Valentino pink, Tod’s orange, Dolce black and, yes, Bottega green.