Burberry and Beckham show sophisticated British dressing

Under its new creative director, it’s all change at Burberry. Riccardo Tisci has turned the British fashion house from an A-list petting zoo to a celebrity-free zone. Does this mean celebs are passé? Not if Burberry’s VIP dressing roster is a marker – Madonna and Rihanna have all featured of late.

The setting for yesterday’s show in Tate Modern looked like a modern take on West Side Story: youths dangling scenically off scaffolding in streetwear, luxurious versions of which appeared on the catwalk. Tisci is good at this, but even better at Bourgeois Burberry: camel leather skirts and jumpers, and Donegal tweed coats with kitten heels, classic Burberry trenches with blankets worked in. Similar to last season but no less appealing, this is British dressing at its most sophisticated.

Victoria Beckham, who showed earlier in the day, has garnered sufficient credibility to be talked of as natural heir to Phoebe Philo’s Céline

– as a source of grown up, luxuriously crafted clothing with just enough fashion edge. The Duchess of Sussex would be wise to wear more Victoria Beckham: it’s sleek, chic and minimalist. It’s also less expensive than Givenchy, and more British.

What’s instructive is how customerfocused Beckham is. She’s in her element meeting the public. One discovery from all that customer face-to-face is that women still turn to her label for dresses. No longer tight and body-con, they’re a flowy, sinuous exemplar of soft power, with clever, flattering details.

The rest was polished, low-key dressing, spiced up with punchy colour mixes; mint and lipstick red; orange and black tweeds with cobalt blue boots; burgundy and duck-egg blue. You could call it conservative chic, or, as Beckham prefers, “proper but not prim; lady but not ladylike”.

Later this year she’ll debut a line of cosmetics and skincare. We can already identify one young consumer: Harper Beckham, sitting front row with a bob uncannily similar to the signature ’do of Anna Wintour, seated nearby. No flies on any of these Beckhams.