Daniel Lee enlists Celia Birtwell to loosen Burberry’s graphic codes – and arrives at something warmer than the house has attempted before
LONDON — Celia Birtwell’s prints have been disrupting things since the late 1960s, when her hand-drawn textiles – faces, florals, and geometric play – became inseparable from Ossie Clark’s cut and the mood of a particular London moment. What she brings to Burberry‘s Summer 2027 collection is similar: a humanizing friction against the house’s more structured instincts.
Daniel Lee framed it in his show notes as “a return to the basis of things” – instinctive, felt, true. It’s an appealing proposition, and this collection makes a reasonable case for it. The House Check, the brand’s most graphic and reliable currency, resolves here into windowpane, then gingham, then a stripe – as though Lee were watching the logo dissolve back into cloth. Women’s skirt suits arrived with intricately embroidered mimosa and lavender flowers; the floral motif carried down to matching pumps. Sheer trench coats in pastel blue and aubergine came over striped dresses. Ditsy florals, face prints, and clashing stripes pushed against each other, while yellow, pink, and green punctured a dominant palette of greys and beiges.
“You can really feel the human hand in it,” Lee said of Birtwell’s contribution. It shows – in the deliberate off-ness of a pattern, the places where the regularity breaks.
Menswear worked a different register: denim, trouser chains, and shorter suits with flowery shirts; the 1970s note sounded without straining for it. Rapper Central Cee walked in low-slung jeans and a hooded जैकेट – a casting choice that gave the clothes a pre-worn authority that suited Lee’s argument about ownership and wear. The Derby bag came with hand-finished florals; the Sloane in woven leather. Trompe l’oeil trench details – belts, epaulets – surfaced through embroidery on airy fabrics, the utility language of the house made tactile rather than declarative.
The venue was Chelsea College of Arts, part of the University of the Arts London, dressed as a white cube with unregimented wooden seating. The restraint was the point. A four-decade David Bowie soundtrack pushed the idea further: not Britishness as heritage institution, but as temperament, as creative stubbornness. Actors Jason Statham and Chiwetel Ejiofor, rappers Skepta and Kano, and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan occupied seats printed with the house check- a crowd that mapped the collection’s own eclecticism.
This collection earns its argument in the specific. The embroidery is serious work. The palette interplay is controlled. Birtwell’s disruptions don’t feel applied from outside; they’re woven into the architecture of the collection. Lee described the intention as “owning a piece, living in it” – imperfection as a design choice. Whether that amounts to a new direction or a single-season proposition is what next year will need to answer.
See the complete collection below:
Images courtesy of Burberry
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