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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.
Jewelry and hardware prints adorned the collection
Print played a huge part in Lee’s proposal. Motifs of jewelry 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-colored 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…
