Burberry: The sex, checks and eccentricities of Daniel Lee's Burberry

Fashion The sex, checks and eccentricities of Daniel Lee's Burberry The nation is nervous. The outlook is gloomy. And at Burberry, one of the last global bastions of British luxury, chief creative officer Daniel Lee is seeking to inject a sensual optimism into our deeply anxious times By Murray Clark Photography by Francesc Planes 24 March 2025 Fashion The sex, checks and eccentricities of Daniel Lee's Burberry Fashion Fashion Fashion The nation is nervous. The outlook is gloomy. And at Burberry, one of the last global bastions of British luxury, chief creative officer Daniel Lee is seeking to inject a sensual optimism into our deeply anxious times By Murray Clark Photography by Francesc Planes 24 March 2025 The nation is nervous. The outlook is gloomy. And at Burberry, one of the last global bastions of British luxury, chief creative officer Daniel Lee is seeking to inject a sensual optimism into our deeply anxious times By Murray Clark Photography by Francesc Planes 24 March 2025 By Murray Clark Photography by Francesc Planes 24 March 2025 By Murray Clark Photography by Francesc Planes London isn't easily shocked. Something earth-shattering - say, a pandemic - might send the world reeling, and yet Soho will still fill up at the first sniff of on-street pints. The more nostalgic among us might call it Blitz mentality; the more reasonable would call it general metropolitan detachment. But on this particular crisp, sub-zero morning, a crowd is gathering at St Paul's Cathedral. People hold iPhones aloft to capture a moment. Granted, they don't know what is happening at this moment; they don't know what it's for, or why it's playing out here. But it feels like a moment - one that's taken London by surprise. After all, this is where Charles and Diana made their ill-fated nuptials. Its place in the British psyche is sacred. Beyond a cordon of hi-vis heavies, a Hollywood-level film production is unfolding. Cherry pickers invade the hallowed space of the 317-year-old dome. Around a fleet of parked up Winnebagos, pop-up kitchens dish out coffee and pastries to runners. And all eyes, on-set and off it, are focused on David Gandy , still Britain's most handsome man, clutching a spray of wilted roses as he's battered by rain that'd be considered biblical if it wasn't coming from a hose that looks a bit like the Loch Ness monster. His heavy brow admits defeat, but his coat - a boxy half-zip Burberry jacket in the house check - does not. The beige silk blend almost shines. "It's silly," says a gleeful aide with a clipboard. Someone calls cut. Gandy is handed a towel and smirks. The entire crew cracks up. "Silly's good," says a light West Yorkshire accent from behind the camera. It belongs to Daniel Lee, Burberry's chief creative officer, and the architect of this sprawling production. "Silly is good." Silly isn't a word you'd immediately assign to someone in Lee's position. He is widely credited as the great energiser of Bottega Veneta , a very serious (and very sexy) Italian brand that went from old-rich-lady bags in 2018 to become A$AP Rocky 's go-to for louche, hyped-up elegance. He studied under the tutelage of very serious designers, like Phoebe Philo (the godmother of austere minimalism), and Nicolas Ghesquière (a grandmaster of Elizabethan-coded luxury). So it's a surprise to have Lee pilot a campaign that feels like a series of Richard Curtis shorts, just with more supermodels. Sadly, there's no sign of Hugh Grant . Plenty of other national treasures check-in, though: Kate Winslet , Micheal Ward , Nicholas Hoult , and Richard E Grant. Naomi Campbell even rides in a black cab with a fully-suited knight - a nod to the equestrian knight insignia Lee resurrected from the Burberry archives. The knight in shining armour is a nod to the cavalier emblem repurposed from the brand's archive. The creative director appears to have sign-off on every last detail. A bouquet for Chen Kun, the Chinese multi-hyphenate, is shown to Lee for a spotcheck before it moves on camera. "I think it looks nice," he says, tilting his head in thought like someone sitting front row at a particularly dense off-Broadway play. "The stems should maybe be a little bit shorter." The cameras roll once more. Gandy gets stood up for a date. It's funny, in a bumbling, absurdist, slightly self-deprecating way; a jolly nihilism that's as unique to the British Isles as a village fête or 14 pints on a bank holiday. Silly is good for Daniel Lee's Burberry, because as one of the most British labels of all, it works to set the brand apart. "I guess that's the difference between us and French and Italian luxury," Lee says. "It's the sense of humour. Everyone wants to be part of it." Think of the continental greats, and the fashion is exclusive; ring-fenced, po-faced, really only for people with elite access. Burberry is a designer brand, too, but it feels more universal, and as one of the few bastions of global British fashion, has a nationwide identity that means something to everybody. Grandparents in Nottinghamshire will have a tale to tell about one of the many iterations of Burberry; could senior citizens in Normandy do the same with Hubert de Givenchy ? Lee and I chit-chat as another scene wraps. He clocks my accent and immediately asks "Where are you from?" with that signature mix of intrigue and caution that comes from a Yorkshire-to-Yorkshire intro. Upon hearing my hometown, a smile breaks through: "Oh, I know there." The air grows a little warmer. We talk about Christmas plans back in the provinces, and walking home from school in horizontal rain, and the dangers of jumbo-sized portions of food that are standard procedure for a Sunday family dinner in Bradford, or Hull, or Leeds. I talk about going home for two weeks, and his eyes widen. "No, just a few days is enough for me." It's a happy scene. The Burberry crew seem content, hopeful even. The mood takes a dent. We're told by a very sombre cameraman that the light is dropping - a dangerous thing if you're in the business of films. As the security guard lets me out, I serpentine through the crowd. Despite the visible clouds of breath and the chattering teeth, it has grown in number. Some onlookers frown with puzzlement. Others crane their necks, still filming videos that will be forgotten in the camera roll. I hear a few people exchange theories: maybe it's a Marvel film, one whispers. Nah, it's a K-pop video. And still they stand, all of them cold, confused, and trying to work out what the fuck is going on with the beautiful people in the gleaming Burberry coats. Two months later, Lee is sitting in his office inside Burberry's Horseferry House HQ , a quietly imposing art deco building just a stone's throw from the stressed staffers and protesters that mill outside the Houses of Parliament. Like Burberry at large, the office has recently undergone a full-scale renovation; inside the vast, sandstone atrium, I perch on a streamlined marshmallowy sofa upholstered in the electric 'Burberry blue' check. A candlelight acoustic cover of Taylor Swift 's "Look What You Made Me Do" ambles from the speakers. Lee has a cold. "Ugh sorry, I'm not very well," he says, greeting me from behind a huge desk. His office, which feels more like a sanctum, is dimly lit and full of clean lines, a few choice bookshelves and little else. It smells expensive. Lee reclines in a petrol-coloured Cole Buxton hoodie, and a tan bomber draped over his shoulders in a way that feels like both a cocoon and a straight-up flex. Lee's hair is still just-ruffled-enough, his chevron jaw accented by the room's many shadows (the creative director famously takes a good photo, the most viral being a shirtless, tranquil 2020 cover of Cultured magazine). Lauryn Hill. Skepta. Despite the blocked sinuses, Lee is on his feet within moments, pulling open a sliding door that joins his office to a studio that is bigger, and full of bright overhead lights. "We were in Soho, and it's obviously a lot cooler, but everyone was split across different floors and the lift was always bust," he says. Lee seems proud of this new space, the design of which he had a direct hand in. "There's about a hundred-ish of us here now [in the design team]. When I first started I was like 'What the hell?' Because in my previous job I had a decent-sized team, but not like this big." Burberry is a giant of British fashion. It employs around 9,000 people worldwide, and crosses multiple categories. That requires a mountain of work. "Normally, brands are accessory-focused, and accessories, frankly, are less work," says Lee. "It's a bigger business here. There's one team that does the main collection, then there's a team that does the shows. And then there's also accessories. There's kids, homeware, soft accessories..." What I remember at Burberry are those great Kate Moss and Liberty Ross pictures in bikinis. That was very sexy. You'd have this trench coat, protected, wrapped up, versus this hot girl in a bikini. Thomas Burberry, the brand's founder, is credited as being the inventor of gabardine, a tough but smooth fabric that was a technical breakthrough at the time, and helped it become the go-to for men who did insane things like trek to the South Pole. It wasn't until the '90s that Burberry became a luxury fashion brand proper, under the steer of Rose Marie Bravo, the brand's former CEO. From 2001 onwards, Burberry enjoyed its boomtimes under the creative direction of Christopher Bailey , a man who managed to meld the aspirational and the attainable with his trademark shine (literally and figuratively: his grail product was arguably the rainbow metallic Burberry trenches that came in 2012). They were happy days for the brand, and for Britain. In the early noughties, the economy was growing steadily. Wages were high. People looked to London to lead, and with it, Burberry. But after 17 years at the brand, Bailey stepped down in 2018 as Britain bruised under the pro-austerity Tory