LONDON — Only connect. There’s always a way. JW Anderson and Burberry are at opposite ends of the British fashion spectrum, but last season, the word “nostalgia” created a connection between the two. Jonathan Anderson was enchanted by the “grotesque everydayness” of a Brit sitcom past. (The tight-curly wigs of his 70′s suburbia decorate the windows of his Soho shop even as we speak.) Daniel Lee at Burberry was engaged in the more urgent task of rendering the brand’s true Brit legacy relevant for an uncaring world, nostalgia being a key weapon in his arsenal. Here we are, seven months later, and now the word that connects JW Anderson and Burberry is transition, which actually speaks to the entire planet’s state of mind. Or, as Anderson wondered while he reflected on fashion’s suffocating giantism after his show on Sunday, “Where is the next decade going?”
He very sensibly claimed that a fashion show always has to have a purpose. His, for this particular moment, was a narrowing of focus to bare essentials, “the raw materials that will define what quality is.” Anderson used four: cashmere knits, sequins, leather and silk. Notably high end, but he cut them into the simplest little shapes for his waif-ish brigade of 21st-century Twiggies. A couple of silk shifts sported text from an early 20th century essay by art critic Clive Bell, who, as Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law, lingers in history as an intimate of the fashion industry’s favourite clique, the Bloomsbury Group. Anderson felt that what the text had to say about the connection between art and design was less important than the fact that it served to emphasise the blank page – the silk shift – on which it appeared. A fresh start. The beginning of something. A transition, in other words.
To what exactly was hard to determine from the collection, which was expressly cryptic in its reductiveness. Or maybe the notion of purification was an interpretation more sensitive to Anderson’s intent. Every model wore the same pair of spacey bike boots. Paired with the uniform little dresses, they created a tough girlie gang vibe, which Anderson said was inspired by nights out with his younger sister and her friends in Northern Ireland. Michel Gaubert corralled techno popstrels like Sophie Powers, diligent students of the one and only dominator Charli XCX, to create a bouncy castle of a soundtrack. There were party tutus, but they were cut from the same leather as the bags and shoes, so they seemed more like UFOs, which kind of gelled with the peculiar pared-down futuristic feel. I mean, could we imagine Anderson’s girlies as female droogs? Clockwork Oranginas? Fashion by its very nature is always about some vision of the future.
Anderson loves a double take so he rolled out a repertoire of trompe-y tricks: the giant basket weave, the exploded argyle knit, the sequin blanket tacked around the body like there was nothing to it at all. Even when there was a more conventional sweater dress, or a mutant MA-1 bomber jacket, they were equally grabby in their barely-there-ness. But the reduction – the purity? – of it felt a little like a full stop, like something completely different starts now for JW Anderson. And that’s transition.
At Burberry, the transition is a lot less graphic, a lot more tortured. Monday’s show inside the brutalist concrete interior of the National Theatre was dressed with BAYS, a monumental work by YBA (geddit?) artist Gary Hume that cut doors and windows into huge suspended swathes of industrial tarpaulin. Daniel Lee loved the piece for Burberry because it reminded him of a trench coat pattern laid flat. Fortunately, Hume agreed to recreate it in a new space. For Lee, their collaboration rather poignantly emphasised the differences in their practices. “Gary only has to please himself, for me as a fashion designer, that’s not the case.” And you can only imagine how much more difficult that is for Lee now, with Burberry’s very public fall from grace continuing apace. Lee insisted he and his team who’ve been with him for years, were continuing to work in a very pleasurable bubble during these most pressing of times. He praised “the American optimism” of the new CEO Josh Schulman as he pointed out that Burberry’s creative heyday in the Christopher Bailey years was sparked by the partnership of an American CEO and a British designer. But he scarcely needed a reminder that bubbles have a nasty habit of bursting.
Lee and team attempted a new approach to Burberry’s ingrained codes. The trench coat and the Burberry check are, after all, the brand’s alpha and omega. Here, the former was airier, lighter, decked with a shearling tippet or refreshed with a zipper and a print that might have been little flower heads or viral spores. The latter was darkened, muted, “so it doesn’t scream Burberry,” Lee said. I don’t know, screaming Burberry might be what customers actually want.
The brand’s august military heritage was reflected in elongated field jackets, combat pants with bellows pockets and zips, and officer’s capelets. The proportions and the details came across as a little like the latest effort to inject fashionability into a brand that has a spotty track record with such ambitions. And then – the cinematic element I’m curiously partial to with Burberry – the air of the 1940s: officers on war leave at a country house, women in party frocks. A kind of frazzled fin-de-siecle flare, embodied here by Lily Donaldson or Jean Campbell in tiers of sequins with a parka thrown over top. That casual, vaguely defiant glamour could almost be relevant for our own End of Days. But it highlights a profound problem at Burberry. Is it only the past that makes sense for this brand? Otherwise, to paraphrase Jonathan Anderson, what was the purpose of this show? Only the CEO knows.
JW Anderson Spring Summer 2025
Burberry Spring Summer 2025
