RICCARDO TISCI
Known best for bringing streetwear into the luxury house of Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci has taken the creative helm at Burberry. And while maintaining a nod to the past, his collections have revealed a bold plan for the brand’s future.
Taking the creative helm at Burberry, the designer has bold plans for the future.
It doesn’t get more British than Burberry. Under chief creative officer Christopher Bailey, who nursed it from a minnow to a whale during his 17-year reign, it projected a comforting, soft-focus view of luxury Britishness – pretty, upmarket Brit girls and boys (Sienna Miller, Keira Knightley, Lily James, Rachel Weisz, Douglas Booth, Matt Smith, Eddie Redmayne) endlessly emoting about the place in iterations of that trench.
But things change. Now there’s a 44-year-old Italian with expertise in designing leathers with S&M overtones in charge.
When Riccardo Tisci’s appointment was announced last year, there was trepidation among Burberry fans. He had transformed the fortunes of Givenchy – a much smaller house (fame isn’t necessarily commensurate with turnover) – by aggressively courting celebrities (he is friends with Beyoncé, Katy Perry, the Kardashians et al) and turning it into a business powered by streetwear.
But how would that sit with Burberry? How could an Italian get under the skin of a quintessentially British sensibility that started life in 1856, when Thomas Burberry – a former draper’s apprentice – opened a small shop in Basingstoke and finally, almost two decades later, invented a waterproof, breathable gabardine?
Inevitably Riccardo Tisci’s first Burberry show was the most anticipated, and most argued over of London Fashion Week. Tisci himself had been drip-feeding teasers on social media for weeks. There was a new logo – emblazoned across Burberry’s LA and Cheongdam-dong stores (and a giant teddy bear installed beneath London’s Marble Arch) – co-designed with Peter Saville, the British graphic designer responsible for Joy Division’s and New Order’s iconic album covers.
Out went the Burberry knight on a horse. In came a seventies-eque curved rendition of the ‘BB’ check, interwoven with ‘TB’ initials (for Thomas Burberry). There would be a collaboration with arch punk Vivienne Westwood. There were pictures on Tisci’s Instagram of Nicki Minaj dressed head to toe in Burberry checks – a full-throttle look that had got the Burberry tartan banned from pubs in the early noughties, when it had become associated with ‘chavs’. It was enough to give any Burberry classicist anxiety attacks.
Walking into the show in south London – a dark room reminiscent of The Box, the notorious nightclub that was dubbed Britain’s “seediest” by one tabloid – wasn’t an auspicious opener. Nor was the 30-minute delay, especially as we had all been told to get there at least half an hour early (unheard-of fashion show protocol). But once the show finally began, the black roof screens all unfurled, the space was flooded with natural light (just as the old Burberry shows had been – the more things change, the more they stay the same) and the classicists could relax. Tisci went straight for them with a series of outfits from Margo Leadbetter’s unimpeachably well-behaved Seventies Good Life wardrobe. There were pleated skirts, pussy bow blouses, chic three-piece trouser suits – and the trench, which appeared in numerous new iterations for both men and women. The most striking featured wide belts, worn externally or internally, and based on the webbed cummerbunds that kept those original military Burberry trenches close to the body.
There was plenty more: for city boys; for street boys; for those who like slinky, black, minimalist evening wear. Tisci had plunged deep into Burberry’s archives – and he’d concluded that “here is a house that can be something for everyone, somewhere mothers and daughters dress, fathers and sons.” He went on to say, “I want to capture everything that’s part of British DNA – from anarchy to conformity, punk to the queen, rock to rap.”
When foreigners talk about Britishness, they often tend to lose themselves in a thicket of fond but