In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.
Want to set your brand apart from the pack with a bit of craft? Call in the octogenarians.
Just kidding, mostly. But the strategy did wonders for Burberry this season: Its Spring/Summer 2027 collection was a colorful, buoyant critical success, thanks to the inimitable talents of 85-year-old textile designer Celia Birtwell. Her signature florals (and some never-before-produced prints of emoji-like faces) appeared on dresses, shirts, and the brand’s signature outerwear. It was the brightest, most shamelessly fun show of London Fashion Week. Yes, fun! Remember her?
Bringing in Birtwell specifically for SS27 was a genius move by the brand’s creative director, Daniel Lee. Her “flower power” prints defined 1960s London, but it’s been more recent forays into fashion that teed her up perfectly for Burberry; her four sell-out Topshop collections in the 2000s and a 2013 Uniqlo collection planted a seed for a new generation of Brits to fall for her patterns. Flash forward a decade or two, and the Burberry collaboration makes those high street fans from years ago not just recognize her, but extend their goodwill to Britain's most famous high-end brand.
The strategy feels a touch Hermès here. The French ultra-luxury house has tapped into the power of actual artists not just in its clothes, but in its entire brand identity, down to its website design. And Lee gets that, noting in a press release that “you can really feel the human hand” in the SS27 collection. But while the connective tissue of a personal touch may bond Burberry to other craft-led brands, Birtwell is just the latest piece in a new-new Burberry pivot entirely its own; one defined by an embrace not just of the brand’s Britishness, but of the country’s deep roster of legendary creatives.
It’s a lesson that took time to settle in. Lest we forget Burberry’s doomed “brand elevation” strategy when Lee took over in 2022, which jacked up prices to levels more aligned with Louis Vuitton and Chanel (and led profits to drop 34%). It took a recalibration of the recalibration — pulling prices back down to more earthbound levels, a fresh CEO, and all that British pride — to finally get the heritage label back on track. But back it most certainly is.
Burberry partnered with Sir Quentin Blake this year, incorporating his “very British style” of hand-drawn illustrations into a small collection, while previous seasonal collections have tapped other beloved Brits: SS26, an ode to Glastonbury, had prints by Pamela Colman Smith, while SS25 included painter Gary Hume, a key figure from the famed Young British Artist collective of the 1990s.
Add to that financial support for institutions like the Royal Academy of Arts and young artists like Sang Woo Kim and carpet-tufting craftsman Tom Atton Moore, and you have a new-new strategy of centering creativity.
Burberry has an energy right now that extends well beyond the runway, by cunning design. See, this season’s standout trench coats, embroidered with Birtwell’s patterns, don’t exist in a vacuum. Just a short tube ride away from the show’s Chelsea College of Arts staging is The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon at V&A South Kensington, a free exhibition that elevates the brand’s signature product to high art. Long live British fashion’s checkered king.
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