Burberry’s second “straight-to-consumer” show was presented at London’s Makers House last night.
Burberry has been at the forefront of a radical shift in the way collections are shown — and sold. The brand has replaced its four-show calendar with two shows, and combined its womenswear and menswear collections, which are then made immediately available to consumers.
All menswear and womenswear looks are now available to buy via Burberry’s physical, digital and partner retail networks, including its flagship Mall of the Emirates store.
The February 2017 collection was a striking tribute to the work and style of British artist Henry Moore, who has long been a source of inspiration for Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative and chief executive office.
Models walked a runway that wove through Moore’s sculptures, in front of an audience that included Penelope Cruz, Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell, Iris Law and Suki Waterhouse.
Moore’s oversized sculptures were reinterpreted in a collection that artfully celebrated volume, asymmetry and bold silhouettes. Soutache and macramé lace were a recurring motif, crafted into barely there dresses or emblazoned onto androgynous jumpers. Asymmetric jumpers were layered onto shirt-dresses, sleeves fell long, Bretton stripes paid tribute to Moore’s artist’s apron and drawings produced by the artist towards the end of his life were reinterpreted into colourful shirts.
Bailey closed the show with a collection of 78 limited-edition couture capes, where Edwardian-style ruffles, outlandish shoulder constructions, feathers and engineered cable knit reined supreme. Each individually named cape is available for special order, and will form part of a travelling exhibition around the world, beginning today at Makers House.
“Henry Moore’s art has always loomed large in my imagination: these great, iconic figures in the British landscape, elemental sculptures that manage also to be human, soft, approachable. I’ve always found them very moving, I think perhaps because they manage to be so monumental and yet so personal, so public and yet so private at the same time,” says Bailey.
“Looking at — and thinking about — his work set up a series of conversations as we were working on this collection; discussions about scale, proportion, texture, patina and shape. We looked at the contradictions in Moore’s work, between power and gentleness, heaviness and lightness, familiarity and abstraction. Between the hardness of his materials and the fluidity and softness of his forms. And we thought about the way in which he makes objects that combine beauty with oddness, the recognisable with the strange.”
sdenman@thenational.ae
