“Living in bad weather”: Burberry glamorises British pragmatism
For Fall/Winter 2026, Daniel Lee turned everyday London into a Burberry study in glossy austerity.
“It’s always Burberry weather,” reads the tagline for a rainy campaign at the centre of the brand’s recent pragmatic reinvention. In London, it’s been pouring down nearly every day of 2026, so you could say that the new business plan is paying off. To call Daniel Lee’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection strictly pragmatic may be a stretch, but there was an austerity to his silhouette and palette that embodied the ongoing streamlining of Burberry. Inside the former fish market at Old Billingsgate by the Thames, he had erected a deconstructed version of Tower Bridge. Beneath it, model traversed an asphalt floor with silicone rain puddles like it was just a normal day in London.
The collection amplified the everyday codes of Burberry. The trench coat was feminised with ruffles or glamorised in glossy leather. The check was interpreted through intricate textural craftsmanship, evoked within the surfaces of shearling or made to look almost holographic on a trench coat. Square and cinched, the silhouette cemented the austere energy, bolstered by a weather-coloured palette applied to shiny fabrics and a lot of leather. There was a yuppie-like sensibility to the way Lee framed the physique, which only served to underscore the fact that Burberry means business.
It’s celebrating what British life is in the winter, which pretty much is living most of the time in the dark; in bad weather.
DANIEL LEE
Post-show, Lee’s musings were also decidedly down to earth: “It’s celebrating what British life is in the winter, which pretty much is living most of the time in the dark; in bad weather.” He had started working on the collection in November as the festive season was kicking in and people were dressing up to go out after work. “I thought of clothes that could make sense, that you could go to work in, but that could also carry you through to a film premiere or a charity gala or a nightclub,” he said. Few things could be more pragmatic than a day-into-evening outfit, a term so native to the shopping pages of the British fashion press.
A parka was emblazoned with an old map of London that Lee had unearthed in the Burberry archives. The same print appeared on scarves placed as presents on every seat. In Paris, big houses have long used the French capital as part of their brand identity. From Chanel to Louis Vuitton, the city’s monuments often serve as iconography symbolic of a kind of covetability: the Paris dream. At Burberry, the London appropriation of this idea – cf. the Tower Bridge set – is an interesting approach. Can the brand make a chic muse of rainy, pragmatic London? Injected with the high-octane glamour that characterised much of Lee’s collection, the look definitely set the house apart from its European competitors.
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