## The Draper's Son

The Draper's Son

Thomas Burberry opened his first shop in Basingstoke in 1856, at twenty-one. He sold outdoor clothing to farmers and sportsmen — practical stuff, heavy wool and canvas that kept the rain off but soaked through if you stayed out long enough. Within a decade he'd begun experimenting with cotton yarn, treating it before weaving so the fibres swelled and locked tight. The result, which he patented in 1888, was gabardine: a twill weave that breathed but didn't leak, light enough to move in, tough enough to last.

It was not an elegant discovery. Burberry was a draper, not a couturier. His customers needed coats that worked. Officers in the Boer War wore gabardine; so did Shackleton in Antarctica. Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in a Burberry anorak. The trench coat, developed for the British Army during the First World War, was a piece of kit before it was a piece of fashion. D-rings for grenades. Epaulettes for rank. A storm shield across the right shoulder to shed water off a rifle. Fifty thousand were issued by 1918.

The company that bears his name today is not the one Thomas Burberry ran. He died in 1926. His sons took over, then sold the business in 1955 to Great Universal Stores, a mail-order conglomerate. What followed was decades of licensing deals — Burberry scarves made in Scotland, Burberry umbrellas made elsewhere, Burberry fragrances, Burberry eyewear, Burberry everything. By the 1990s the check had slipped so far down-market it became shorthand for a particular stripe of British chavdom. The trench coat, meanwhile, stayed exactly where it was: a piece of outerwear so fixed in form that even forty years of brand drift couldn't ruin it.

What Remains

Walk into the Burberry archive in Horseferry Road and you will see trenches from 1952, from 1971, from last season. The bones are identical. The collar still stands four inches when turned up. The raglan sleeve still runs from neck to cuff in one clean line, no shoulder seam to catch water. The belt is still 2.5 inches wide, long enough to wrap twice and knot at the hip. The storm shield is still there, even though no one carries a rifle anymore.

This is not romantic. It is arithmetic. The trench works because its proportions were solved a century ago by people who needed it to work. When Christopher Bailey arrived as design director in 2001, he didn't redesign the trench. He tightened the fit slightly, narrowed the lapel by a quarter-inch, and left the rest alone. When Riccardo Tisci took over in 2018, he did the same. Daniel Lee, who joined as chief creative officer in 2022, has so far shown no interest in changing it either.

The question is not whether the trench endures. It does. The question is what else Burberry is.

The Bailey Era

Christopher Bailey was thirty when he joined Burberry. He'd trained at the Royal College of Art, worked under Donna Karan and Tom Ford at Gucci. He understood that Burberry's problem was not its heritage but its licensing. The check had been slapped on so many products for so long that it had lost all meaning. His solution was to pull it back. He reduced the number of licensees, bought back control of key categories, and used the trench as a lens. If it didn't relate to the trench — to the idea of British outerwear, to gabardine, to weather — it didn't belong.

The Prorsum runway shows, which Bailey launched in full in 2002, were exercises in restraint. Trenches in black, in navy, in stone. Trenches cropped short, worn over pencil skirts. Trenches in leather, in shearling, in bonded cotton. The check appeared, but sparingly — as a lining, as a scarf, never as the point. By 2006, when Bailey became creative director, Burberry's revenue had tripled. By 2014, when he was named CEO as well, it had tripled again.

But Bailey's Burberry was also, increasingly, a performance of Britishness. The runway shows became events: live-streamed, soundtracked by British musicians, cast with British models. There were references to the Bloomsbury Set, to the mods, to the suffragettes. The clothes were accomplished — Bailey understood construction, understood proportion — but the narrative began to feel like a loop. How many times can you invoke the trench, the check, the rain, before it stops meaning anything at all?

The Reset

Riccardo Tisci arrived in 2018 with a brief to modernise. He replaced the equestrian knight logo with a geometric monogram, swapped the check for a striped logo print, and filled the runways with streetwear-inflected tailoring. The trench stayed, but now it came with logo-tape straps and oversized buckles. The reviews were mixed. The clothes sold, particularly in Asia, but the Burberry Tisci presented felt unmoored from the Burberry people thought they knew.

Daniel Lee's appointment in 2022 felt like a correction. Lee had spent five years at Bottega Veneta, where he'd built a reputation for quiet luxury and serious leather goods. His first Burberry collection, shown in February 2023, opened with a trench in waxed cotton, cut close and worn over narrow trousers. There were shearling aviators, cashmere car coats, lean tailoring in charcoal and navy. The check appeared on a blanket-weight scarf, on the lining of a duffle. It was there, but it was not the point.

What Lee seems to understand is that Burberry's strength is not its iconography but its materials. Gabardine is still woven in Yorkshire, 136 years after Thomas Burberry patented it. The trench is still made in Castleford, cut and sewn by hand. These are facts, not stories. They do not need to be dressed up.

What You Inherit

Thomas Burberry did not set out to build a fashion house. He set out to solve a problem: how to make a coat that kept you dry without weighing you down. The company that carries his name has spent the last two decades trying to figure out what to do with that inheritance. The trench endures because it was never about fashion. The question is whether Burberry can build a wardrobe around it that feels as solved, as certain, as necessary. Lee has three years, maybe four, to find out. The trench will still be there when he's done.