Daniel Lee staged his second show for Burberry in Highbury Fields, with a practical collection which felt appropriate for a morning stroll through one of London’s many parks. British Vogue’s fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen shares the five key takeaways from the show, below.
The show took place in Highbury Fields
It was an outdoor affair at Burberry on Monday afternoon, or at least as close as you get to it in the Islington area. For his second show for the British house, Daniel Lee erected a tent within Highbury Fields and filled it with green benches draped in quilted blankets topped with empty hip flasks. As guests arrived – Kylie Minogue, Naomi Campbell, Mo Farah and Skepta amongst them – food vans outside the tent served hot drinks and Eccles cakes to cement the particular national spirit Lee is bringing to Burberry: a contemporary city take on British country culture; Princess Anne goes to Archway, if you will.
Jewellery and hardware prints adorned the collection
Print played a huge part in Lee’s proposal. Motifs of jewellery and hardware – and the knight clips, shields and ‘B’ buckles of Burberry’s revived archive branding – added a bourgeois elegance to his somewhat stark silhouette, which felt like a vague riff on the daintier sides to British dressing. If there was a scarf-wearing lady reference in there, she was abstracted in dresses made from scarf-like ruffles, which Lee also perverted through wet-look material that evoked bin bags. As this season’s answer to last season’s graphic primary-coloured checks, the patterns brought a new sense of lightness to proceedings.
The silhouette was practical and park-ready
Lee described his sophomore collection for Burberry as “an exploration of lightness, sensuality, beauty and elegance.” Evoked through the brand’s eternal codes – the trench coat, above all – he introduced a graphic, geometric silhouette that accentuated the shoulders through the sharpness of epaulettes or triangular cut lines, and a dropped hip through low-rise trousers and belts. The trench coat appeared largely in its original form, albeit oversized and squared and often worn as dresses. In his approach to the house’s emblem, Lee’s intentions felt particularly realistic: practical and park-ready.
Motifs evoked British flowers and fruits
As the show came to its climax, the nature-centricity Lee is bringing to Burberry – the great outdoors, the urban outdoors, the pretend-outdoors – came full bloom in dresses adorned with “English garden flowers and soft summer fruits” through poppy, forget-me-not and rose prints and embroideries. They made for a very tactile, textured and three-dimensional contrast to the sleek, clean, sharply-tailored suits Lee proposed for his male clientele. There was a case for quiet luxury in there, and a big proposition for red carpet dressing through the lens of Lee’s fuss-free Burberry.
The accessories were inimitably Daniel Lee
Set to a soundtrack by the British musician Dean Blunt – which included a blast-from-the-past sample of Victoria Beckham’s brilliant solo track Out of Your Mind – the collection continued the intensified focus on accessories that characterised Lee’s first show for Burberry. The shoes echoed the robust sci-fi sensibility of his Bottega Veneta bestsellers (and reached a zenith in crystal-encrusted crocs-like slippers), while bags with massive statement straps came in organic silhouettes with added hardware pizzazz, nodding at the prints’s focus on jewels and metals.
Editor
Anders Christian MadsenCredit
Lead image: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
