The trench coat hangs in the archive vault, canvas stiff with age and lanolin

The trench coat hangs in the archive vault, canvas stiff with age and lanolin. The label reads 1914. The storm shield still buttons across the chest. The D-rings where an officer would have clipped field equipment remain fixed at the waist. The garment predates the check by decades. It predates the runway. It was made for rain and mud, and it has outlived every campaign it was designed to serve.

Burberry built its name on function long before it considered heritage.

Gabardine and the Great War

Thomas Burberry opened his first shop in Basingstoke in 1856. He was twenty-one. The work was outfitting, which meant making garments that moved with the body and kept out English weather. In 1879 he patented gabardine, a tightly woven cotton twill that repelled water without the weight of rubberised cloth. The fabric breathed. It dried quickly. It became standard issue.

By 1914, the British War Office commissioned Burberry to develop an officer's coat. The result was the Tielocken, which would later be called the trench coat. The design was specific: a double-breasted front for wind resistance, epaulettes to display rank, a belt to carry weight, vents at the back for movement on horseback. The coat was not conceptual. It was engineering.

After the armistice, soldiers returned in their trench coats. Burberry adapted the silhouette for civilian life and opened the garment to women. By the 1920s, explorers wore Burberry gabardine to the poles. Pilots wore it in open cockpits. The coat moved from the front lines to the everyday without losing its form.

The check appeared later, in the 1920s, as a lining. Camel, red, black, and white in a repeating tartan grid. It was an internal signature, visible only when the coat was open or the collar turned up. The pattern stayed inside until the 1960s, when it began appearing on umbrellas, then scarves, then everything else. What had been discrete became declarative.

Expansion and the weight of recognition

Burberry spent the latter half of the twentieth century as a house divided between its archive and its accessibility. The trench remained, but the check proliferated. Licensing agreements in the 1980s and 1990s brought the pattern onto products Burberry did not control. The tartan appeared on baseball caps, on dog collars, on counterfeit goods sold from market stalls across Europe and Asia. By the early 2000s, the check had become shorthand not for heritage but for aspiration without discretion.

The house pulled back. In 2001, Christopher Bailey arrived as design director and began the work of reconsolidation. He reduced licensing. He brought production in-house. He returned to the trench as the central garment and built collections that referenced the archive without replicating it. The Prorsum line reintroduced tailoring. The runway shows, held in vast white tents, became spectacles of Britishness—live music, digital integration, models cast for their presence rather than their anonymity.

Under Bailey, Burberry became the first luxury house to livestream its runway in 2010. The shows were available to anyone with an internet connection at the same moment buyers and editors saw them in person. Pieces could be ordered immediately after they appeared on the catwalk. The model collapsed the traditional six-month gap between presentation and purchase, and other houses followed.

But accessibility remained a tension. The check, even in reduced doses, carried associations the house could not fully control. Burberry's customer base was broad, but its image was not always aligned with the precision Bailey sought in the garments. The trench was still the trench. Everything else required constant recalibration.

Bailey departed in 2018 after 17 years. Riccardo Tisci arrived from Givenchy five months later.

Tisci and the language of symbols

Tisci's first act was to commission a new logo. Peter Saville, the graphic designer, delivered a sans-serif monogram and a revised crest. The TB cipher interlocked Thomas Burberry's initials in a way that felt less like heritage and more like code. The logo was modern in the way that modernism is always a choice to subtract.

The collections under Tisci leaned into symbols: the monogram printed large on nylon, the check reworked in tonal leather, the trench deconstructed and rebuilt with exaggerated proportions. He cast Burberry as a house capable of streetwear and suiting simultaneously, a position that required the garments to code-switch depending on how they were worn. A nylon bomber with the TB print could sit next to a wool car coat with a clean shoulder line. Both were Burberry, but they addressed different audiences.

Tisci also brought in collaborators from outside fashion. Vivienne Westwood for a capsule that merged punk and propriety. Supreme for a drop that sold out in minutes. These were not dilutions but expansions, ways of speaking to constituencies that had not previously considered Burberry as theirs.

The work was effective, but it was also restless. Tisci's Burberry moved quickly, releasing monthly product, responding to the pace of digital attention. The house became visible in ways it had not been under Bailey, but visibility is not the same as coherence.

Tisci's final show was in February 2022. Daniel Lee, formerly of Bottega Veneta, was named chief creative officer that autumn.

Lee and the return to making

Lee's first collection for Burberry appeared in February 2023. The trench was there, but so was a new attention to construction. Coats with curved seams that followed the body's architecture. Knits with visible selvage edges. Leather worked in panels that acknowledged the shape of the hide. The clothes were not loud. They were specific.

Lee has spoken less about Britishness and more about craft. His Burberry does not announce itself with logos. The TB monogram remains, but it is smaller, placed where a label would traditionally sit. The check appears occasionally, reworked in jacquard or woven into the structure of the cloth rather than printed on top. The house is still recognisable, but the recognition is quieter.

The bags under Lee have followed the same logic. The Knight bag, introduced in his debut collection, is a soft hobo shape with an equestrian-inspired buckle. The leather is thick, vegetable-tanned, the kind that will crease and darken with use. It is not precious. It is made to be handled.

Lee has also brought back outerwear as the centre of the collection. Not just the trench, though that remains, but parkas, anoraks, field jackets—garments that acknowledge weather and movement. The silhouettes are clean, the details considered. A hood that folds into the collar. A pocket placed where the hand naturally falls. These are not gestures. They are decisions made in the pattern.

The house now holds two truths simultaneously. It is 168 years old, and it is being rebuilt in real time. The trench from 1914 still hangs in the archive. The trench from 2024 is cut from the same cloth, with the same storm shield, but the shoulder is wider and the sleeve is set differently. Both are correct. Both are Burberry.

The work is not to preserve the past but to continue the line of thinking that made the past possible. Gabardine was an innovation before it was a tradition. The trench was functional before it was iconic. Lee's task is not to manage heritage but to make garments that will be worn long enough to become it.

A coat is still a coat. It keeps out rain. Everything else is what we decide to carry.