The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Why the over-50s are back in fashion at Burberry
As profits tumble, the brand is rolling out national treasures and a heritage store to reclaim former glory, writes Lisa Armstrong
If ever there were a fifth British emergency service – and frankly our fashion industry could do with one just now – surely it should be fronted by Joanna Lumley, Olivia Colman and Mary Berry. Two damehoods, an Oscar, a CBE, oodles of plucky stoicism and the kind of diction that still makes Americans swoon (don’t knock it, instead, exhort your kids to abandon their Mockney), you have to be afflicted with terminal grouchiness not to feel a reassuring warmth, however temporary, in the vicinity of your cockles.
This presumably is what Burberry banked on when it invited all three (and Dame Anna Wintour) to its big knees-up at Harrods on Thursday night. Dame Mary has Burberry form, having been photographed in the new plaid in uber-hipster café Norman’s as part of last season’s campaign. Even if you are uninterested in these national treasures per se, it’s a fascinating marketing move in an era when other brands have gone down a vacuous black hole of nepo babies.
But then Burberry is a fascinating brand which currently finds itself with an interesting (as in the Chinese curse) set of problems. Founded in 1856 by a precocious Thomas Burberry (he was 21 – you could tell that to your kids too) who went on to invent gabardine, it has, by turns, been the first choice for semi-mad Edwardian explorers, fodder for tourists (who lapped up its checked bags and scarves in Duty Free) and the epitome of British cool – at least as far as rich Americans and Asians were concerned – under creative director Christopher Bailey, who had the good sense to mine every British trope and attractive celebrity under our sun.
Sometimes Burberry has been several things at once – as any brand must be if it wants to be globally big. In 2002, for instance, Burberry ran into a spot of bother when former EastEnders actress, Danniella Westbrook, along with her toddler daughter and her buggy were all photographed decked out in the brand’s famous check. Combined with enthusiastic (fake) Burberry uptake by unruly football supporters, this provoked an outpouring of faux outrage in the British media which couldn’t have been more appalled if they’d discovered pictures of Pol Pot, Stalin and Kim Jong-il posing in checked Burberry thongs.
Britain’s most successful luxury fashion brand was ridiculed, the length of the land. In the years that followed, its powers-that-be (Bailey and CEO Angela Ahrendts) kept calm and carried on gifting Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Jude Law, who continued to look fabulous in those trench coats. It honed in on the children’s range it had launched with the late, very aristocratic Stella Tennant. After a mini blip, turnover and profits continued their ascent as doggedly as Sir Ernest Shackleton (a huge Burberry fan) persisted with his expeditions across Antarctica.
Bailey never quite cracked the code that delivers adored, luxury bags however – something his successor, Riccardo Tisci, appointed in 2018, tried to address. Tisci, an Italian, elevated Burberry’s accessories, but was too preoccupied with making it cool. The whole point of Burberry is that it is a “warm” brand and shouldn’t ever be too cool for school. Post Covid, its recovery has been nothing like as perky that of Prada, Dior and Chanel – all houses that seem to know very clearly who their main customers are. Burberry, as Daniel Lee, its new creative director, recently told me, “should appeal to everyone, from the street to the Royal family”.
This is a cuddly soundbite, mighty hard to pull off but not impossible. Barbour (sales up by 20 per cent in April 2023, albeit from a far smaller base than Burberry) is happily worn by farmers and the Alexa Chung crowd. The key, as Bailey discovered 20 years ago, is to speak to several audiences simultaneously, without them necessarily realising they’re not your only targets. By all means lay on catwalk shows and proper front-row A-listers, but make sure you’re also doubling down on what people really want from you: top-of-the-class trenchcoats and luxe-y looking accessories that are distinctively Burberry but not same old, same old.
Lee has been doing this, to be fair. His sumptuous trenches have been editorial catnip – it would be good to see some of the less expensive ones get a look in, though. He’s made fashion footwear that’s also rugged and functional, re-scaled and re-coloured the checks, and is really going for it with cobalt blue, a colour he’s determined to make synonymous with Burberry (they call it Knight Blue).
Harrods’ doormen, normally liveried in green, wore blue on Thursday.
But the long-awaited turnaround is taking longer than Lee’s lightning strike at Bottega Veneta, the Italian leather brand he metaphorically set on fire six years ago. Nor does Burberry have the luxury of a leisurely approach. Kicking off its not so happy 168th year, the company announced it was lowering its profit forecasts to between £410million and £460million, down from earlier predictions of as much as £668million. The results saw stock fall by 15 per cent in London, the sharpest decline in more than a decade, making Burberry one of the worst performers of the capital’s biggest companies.
Hence the need for that fifth emergency (fashion) service. While a 70-plus woman (Berry is 88) with ballsy style has leverage (last season, Loewe’s creative director Jonathan Anderson successfully made a talking point out of a campaign that starred Dame Maggie Smith, looking like Gwyneth Paltrow’s great-greatgrandmother in The Royal
Tenenbaums), Burberry’s Brit-centric dames only resonate in the UK and need international back up.
Hence Barry Keoghan, 31, the Irish breakout star from Saltburn – a major hit with Gen Z and millennials – and Eiza González, 34, a Mexican actress, have both been out and about in Burberry in recent days. González has starred in a number of Hollywood blockbusters that may not have crossed your or my horizons. That’s the point.
None of this works without great product and ideally several really hot items that capture the imagination – the way Dior’s book totes did six years ago, or Prada’s Re-Nylon range has.
This really matters. Not just for Burberry’s last two remaining UK factories, which produce the trench coats and currently employ and skill up 700 employees.
If one of Britain’s most prestigious clothing brands sinks back into the dusty irrelevancy of its early 90s state, what does that say about this country as a place to build a viable luxury fashion business?