Brainwashing is not so difficult nowadays: send the same message continuously on social media, refine it, tailor it to your targets in pure Cambridge Analytica style, and eventually people will start believing what you're saying.
So after months advertising Riccardo Tisci's arriving at Burberry and weeks emphasising how Peter Saville designed the new Burberry logo, it was only logical that the runway was going to be hailed as a moment or rebirth for a brand representing British heritage.
Tisci divided the show (and the collection) it in three parts - Refined, Relaxed, and Evening. The opening knee-length, buttoned up trench-coat cinched at the waist by a wide shape-defining elastic belt (a classic Tisci trick) was followed by high-waist trousers, pencil skirts and leather skirts with side ruffles, matched with blazers and fluid pussybow blouses (at times with horizontal and vertical checks creating illusionary geometries) borrowed from the archives.
Beige, camel, caramel, chocolate and nude tones prevailed in this section in which things seemed extremely restrained, proper and polite for Tisci's standards. Saville's new logo provided optical madness and actually worked better on shoes than on jackets, tops and pencil skirts.
Yes, there were sexy moments, and Tisci tried to break free a bit using head scarves in interesting ways, threading through jackets or collaging the scarves around the bottom of a raincoat, but the emphasis was on heritage and maybe on making the shareholders happy.
One garment that went unnoticed broke the serenity of the runway: a sheer blouse was printed with a Victorian photograph showing three kids, one of them in the arms of a hidden figure (this is pure Tisci here - finding a random image/reference on the Internet and using it for its visual allure...).
Victorian mothers often disguised themselves behind rugs, carpets, curtains, gloomy damasked tapestries and blankets and pretended to be chairs and couches or part of the studio backdrop to make sure a photographer could take a good studio picture of their babies as slow exposure times and impatient infants were recipes for photographic disasters. In some cases they were also disguised as chairs to keep a deceased child in position (post-mortem pictures were popular in Victorian times).
If you had known the story behind the picture you would have therefore spotted the exact moment Tisci's gothic sensibility broke with the serenity of the bourgeoisie mood and the commercial interest of the shareholders.
After the ladies came the menswear including plenty of anonymous office gear for the managers out there, but also shirts that may prove desirable with younger types (though maybe matching the sheer rhombus sweater with a Burberry house check was maybe an optical faux pas not to try in real life...).
The punks that followed represented instead the core of the second section of the runway, and hinted at Tisci's personal experiences and his decision to move to London where he studied fashion and fell in love with the rebellious side of the British capital.
In this section he injected his personality and his trademark designs: there were plenty of leather mini-skirts, metal-trimmed and grommet jackets and red shiny "Don't Look Now"-evoking anoraks matched with flat Mary Janes with thick soles.
Bambi, a constant reference of Tisci returned in the images printed on the shirts, but also in coats and tops, one of them emblazoned with the slogan "Why Did They Kill Bambi?" a reference to the never released Sex Pistols film "Who Killed Bambi?" (and to the eponymous song written by Edward Tudor-Pole and Vivienne Westwood), but also a reminder to consumers that Burberry has pledged to go fur free from now on, a sign of atonement after the revelations this Summer that the brand destroyed $37.8 million worth of unsold product (there were also faded animal prints in the show, maybe a further hint at Burberry saying goodbye to real fur).
For the Burberry loving chavs who embarrassed so much the brand that Burberry stopped producing baseball caps, there were super cropped tracksuit jackets to wear with shirts, so there was truly something for everybody, even though there was also a major faux pas in here.
Tisci, who sampled snippets of phrases from Shakespeare and had them printed on his shirts (well, if Virgil Abloh does random words in inverted commas, Burberry can randomly quote Shakespeare - makes sense), and had the name of the brand and other words printed in white on a red background, ending up looking way too similar to the Supreme logo and maybe revealing the secret hope of turning Burberry into a hyper cool brand à la Supreme.
In a way this was sanitised punk fashion for people with money, in the same way as the passports around the models' necks weren't an anti-Brexit call, but a sign of belonging to the Burberry Kingdom.
The show closed with black evening wear: the long jersey dresses, some of them subtly edged with sparkling crystals, will resist the test of time better than the designs with the logo, representing an addition to the Burberry wardrobe.
The final idea of the collection, as the designer explained, was providing a wardrobe for all the family (who can afford it) - mother and daughter, father and son, while bringing back refined glamour and chic on the runway after the runway appropriated streetwear (then why on earth did Tisci have to recreate the Supreme logo?).
Though at 134 looks the collection should have been drastically edited, there were some positive notes in this new Burberry: in his 17 year tenure Christopher Bailey suffocated the brand with his curatorial attempts (exhibitions, music curated by etc).
Tisci had the decency to turn to other people as well and Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja designed the music for the show, while in a couple of months the brand will release a collaboration with Dame Vivienne Westwood (Tisci is a fan). Hopefully turning to other enlightened minds in future will allow the brand to become more innovative and experimental, or maybe we are just convicing ourselves that Burberry is going through a Renaissance while we are just admiring the post-mortem picture of a fashion brand. Guess that, as it usually happens in this cases, only time will tell.
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