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.”
Another trick at Burberry is to bear intergenerational relevance in mind. A hard one to crack, but Lee’s showing signs of getting there. He pulled a soft-yellow diagonal-check georgette blouse with a double-layer bias-cut collar off a rack. “This is our take on the pussy-bow blouse,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing my mum and auntie would wear. I’ve kind of gone mad with lots of different colorways.” The realization is that each piece has to live alone and justify its usefulness and quality, but it’s the way you put them together that creates character.
You can see that when Lee styles a cargo pant with a pointy mule, and tops the look with a polished chestnut leather belted moto-jacket. It’s just a teensy bit 1990s Spice Girl; Lee’s generation of childhood idols. It’s the same with the way Lee clearly takes delight in embedding secret branding signals—based on his deconstructing of the Burberry Prorsum knight logo—into products. It’s a case of you know, if you know, to look out for shield-shapes, horse bits, pennants, and chargers.
He took delight in holding up a Knight bag, pointing out how two pieces of leather cut in the shape of shields constitute the sides of the softly slouchy shoulder bag, so the effect has a subtly off, asymmetric heft. He says it’s taken time to get down to executing this level of detail and control over the product. “Over the last 18 months we’ve been tasked with working on revolutionizing the whole product offer. It’s taken a minute. This is collection number six,” he said. “So I feel like this now feels like it’s fully there in terms of the brand and the detail.”
I asked Lee how he copes with the stress and responsibilities of turning a big ship at a time when economic headwinds (never mind the rain) are notoriously strong. “It’s very much a team environment here. In my team, I’ve known a lot of people since school, so that’s very protective,” he replied. “I’m fortunate in my team that I have a lot of people I trust, and that I really respect the opinion of, so that really helps me feel okay even when it’s difficult times, when we’re going through a more challenging moment.”
A completely renovated Daniel Lee Burberry store is due to reopen in Manhattan in October—that’ll be the first time New Yorkers will be able to experience his whole vision. The real verdict, of course, will come then, from consumers who get to see and touch this collection on rails in stores. If anyone’s anything like me, I think they’ll be tempted.
