THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Christopher Bailey has always cherished Burberry’s past, in order to understand the future of this quintessentially British brand, while continuing to explore the landscapes of art and fashion. This season, he returns to his own Yorkshire roots, inspired
Saythe word ‘Burberry’, and what does it mean to you? The Queen in her trench-coat, on a rainy day in the countryside? Stella Tennant, a longstanding face of the brand, with a Burberry scarf wrapped around her, as the wind whips her hair on a Yorkshire moor? Or do you remember Burberry’s remarkable history as the outfitter to explorers, including Ernest Shackleton, who wore a patented parka and trousers on his expedition to Antarctica; or the unsung soldiers in their gabardine coats, in the trenches of World War I?
For Burberry signifies all this, and more, as a quintessentially British brand, established in Basingstoke in 1856 by an enterprising draper’s assistant, the 21-year-old Thomas Burberry. Since then, Burberry has become an institution – like the BBC or Royal Ascot – that seems to speak to our sense of national identity (for better or worse). And ever since Christopher Bailey joined Burberry in 2001 – first as design director, then creative director, and eventually as CEO and chief creative officer – he, too, has been the focus of much attention and debate, almost as if he were the company’s founder, in the manner of a Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani (albeit a profoundly British equivalent).
I first met Bailey in 2005, when I interviewed him in Yorkshire – a place close to his heart, for he was born in Halifax, and his family still lives in the area. Burberry, too, has strong links with the region, producing its famous trenchcoats in Castleford, and using local textiles and tweeds. This profound connection between Bailey, Burberry and Yorkshire continues to be important, not only in practical terms of manufacturing, but also as part of the creative process. Hence the inspiration for Bailey’s latest collection (shown in February at London Fashion Week, and already in the shops) is the art of Henry Moore, who was born in Castleford in 1898, and whose work has influenced Bailey ever since he encountered it in the open-air landscapes of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
‘I first went to the Sculpture Park when I was about 13,’ says Bailey, when we meet at Burberry’s headquarters in London, in a studio where the new collection is displayed, alongside photographs of Moore at work on his sculptures, and reproductions of his evocative line drawings. ‘I had one of my first dates there – clearly, it’s not the right place to take a girl on the date: we went on the bus, so she didn’t think it was very romantic.’ He laughs ruefully, shaking his head at his younger self. ‘She didn’t fall in love with me, but I loved it there – the wildness of the landscape, and these incredible monumental pieces by Henry Moore that I discovered for myself, by being given the freedom to wander, rather than being told to go in a certain direction.’
Outside, it’s a raw wintry day, and the rain is pouring from slate-grey skies; but the weather seems somehow appropriate to our conversation. After all, Burberry was built on designing trenchcoats and outerwear to withstand the worst weather; or in the words of Open Spaces, an early-20th-century book that Bailey discovered in the company archives, ‘the firm’s progress was due not only to the assistance it was able to give explorers, pioneers and big game hunters in all parts of the world, but to its ability to meet the wants of ordinary men and women, engaged in the less formidable pursuits of pleasure or duty, but nevertheless subservient to the daily necessity of trying to solve the meteorological conundrums of our island Sphinx.’
Even though he is now 45, as Bailey talks, you can see flashes of the boy he once was; the shy smile, the ruffled sandy hair, the genuine enthusiasm and continuing sense of wonderment at the places and people he cherishes. The son of a carpenter and an M&S window dresser, he has one sister (Natalie, who is married with two children, and lives in West Riding, close to their parents), and although his maternal grandmother was a seamstress, Bailey had no particular urge to go into fashion when he was growing up. ‘I wasn’t one of those kids that used to play with dolls and make dresses,’ he says. ‘But I always had a strong imagination, and I loved imagery and words.’ He read the Brontës ‘all the time’, and grew up not far from their home in Haworth, ‘which is a weirdly amazing place, it has a real mystery’. As for the wild moorland beyond the Brontë Parsonage, immortalised by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights – ‘that was my landscape, too, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, I now know how bloody lucky I was to grow up in that environment. It’s bleak out there, but I love it, and feel very at home in that landscape.’
His other great stroke of luck, he says, was to have an inspiring art teacher at school. ‘For whatever reason, she believed in me. And if it hadn’t been for her, I’d have ended up in Halifax, probably working in a shop, because I had no idea that art school even existed. I remember at our school careers day, they asked, did I want to be a butcher or a plumber or go into the army? But I loved ceramics and pottery and drawing, and my art teacher said, “Why don’t you send off your work to art school?”’
He applied to several, and ended up doing a foundation course in the fashion department at Dewsbury College. Again, he says he was fortunate to find two more mentors: ‘Lynne Webster and David Backhouse, who were the tutors, took me under their wing. They had a beautiful clothes company at the time, called Quaker, and they gave me a Saturday job and opened my eyes to a more sophisticated world that hadn’t been part of my vocabulary until then.’
After Dewsbury, he moved on to a fashion degree at the University of Westminster, and then completed an MA at the Royal College of Art, where he was talent-spotted by Donna Karan, who gave him his first job in New York after he graduated. He subsequently moved to Milan to work for Tom Ford as senior designer of womenswear at Gucci, during which time he fell in love with his partner of eight years, Geert Cloet, who also worked at Gucci, before becoming brand director of Miu Miu. After Cloet was diagnosed with a brain tumour in June 2004, the couple bought a house in Yorkshire, to be closer to Bailey’s family;
‘I loved the wildness of the landscape and the incredible, monumental pieces by Henry Moore I discovered there for myself ’
tragically, Cloet died in the summer of 2005, at the age of 36.
When I first talked to Bailey, it was just a few months after this devastating bereavement, and while his grief was very apparent, it seemed that the intense demands of his work at Burberry, if not yet a solace, provided a means for him to be able to continue to focus on the future. Fashion can be a way of looking ahead – of predicting and creating new desires – yet Burberry’s historic legacy was also a reminder that we are all shaped by the past. Indeed, Bailey had immersed himself in the company archives – which until his arrival, had been more or less forgotten, consigned to oblivion apart from the devoted attention of a single archivist – and it was here that he discovered that Thomas Burberry had designed luxurious women’s gowns, as well as the practical raincoats more often associated with the brand. As a consequence, Bailey encouraged everyone who worked for Burberry to engage with its heritage – a task that has continued to be at the forefront of his mind, even as the brand came to be defined by its use of new technology, embracing digital marketing and live-streaming its catwalk shows. ‘Without knowing where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going to,’ said Bailey to me, during our initial encounter, more than a decade ago; and it’s a mantra that remains as true to him now as it was when he first arrived in London.
If Bailey knows that grief and loss can descend without warning, tempestuous as a sudden storm in Wuthering Heights, he also understands that love can alight again in unexpected ways. In 2009, he met the actor Simon Woods (an Old Etonian who read English at Oxford, where his girlfriend was Rosamund Pike; they subsequently appeared together in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride & Prejudice in 2005). Bailey and Woods fell in love, and were married in a civil ceremony in 2012; they now have two young daughters.
Just as family and stability are part of where Bailey has come from, along with his attachment to the rugged Yorkshire landscape, so too is a commitment to the art and literature that has inspired him. The Bloomsbury Group has been a significant influence on his work at Burberry – including the distinctive decorative paintings by the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant at Charleston, their country home in Sussex; and the writing of Virginia Woolf, whose novel Orlando was referenced in Bailey’s September 2016 collection, and whose sense of the imaginative power of clothes is reflected in Bailey’s own aesthetic.
An affinity with Henry Moore – and his contemporary Barbara Hepworth – is also apparent in Bailey’s designs, as a touchstone that goes back a number of years. (In Burberry’s spring/summer 2012 womenswear collection, for example, the hand-blocked prints were inspired by Moore’s drawings.) Bailey is hesitant about making explicit comparisons – he is too self-deprecating to draw parallels between art and fashion – but he does admit, ‘I’ve felt close to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, which sounds very pretentious, but I related to them, because they were from Yorkshire, they came from the same landscape as I did, and that made their art more tangible for me. I could understand it, because we came from the same place…’
Given that fashion and art can sometimes inhabit a shared space, the link between landscape and the female figure that defines Moore’s sculptures might also be a clue to understanding Bailey’s work at Burberry. Of course, the women of Moore’s imagination are broad-hipped and voluptuous, and therefore entirely different shapes to the waiflike models that inhabit Burberry ad campaigns or walk on the catwalk. Bailey says that the starting point, for him, was ‘the connection between Henry Moore and Burberry, through Castleford; but also because we wanted to play with the idea of shape, silhouette and texture, as well as exploring how something that is flat – a piece of fabric – can become three-dimensional and sculpted.’ The resulting collection makes no blatant reference to Moore’s art, but it looks and feels handmade – shirts and dresses of delicate white-cotton English lace contrasting with dark wool tailored coats and beautifully textured cream woollen sweaters – and its timeless, subtle appeal seems to be the antithesis of computer-generated fast fashion. As such, it’s also a natural continuation of the September 2016 collection, which emphasised the craftsmanship of Burberry. This was not only apparent in the clothes themselves, but also the setting for the show, in a former bookshop on Charing Cross Road that was christened Makers House for the occasion, with workshops on the ground floor revealing the artisan expertise that went into the making of each piece of clothing.
‘When you understand the process, and see the complexity of how things are created and made, it resonates much more