Burberry's 170th Birthday Show Hands Its Check to Celia Birtwell

Burberry closed London Fashion Week on September 21 with a show built around a birthday: the house turns 170 this year, and creative director Daniel Lee marked it by handing its most recognizable asset, the camel, black, white and red check, to someone from outside fashion entirely. Celia Birtwell, the British textile designer best known for the prints she made for Ossie Clark in the 1970s, hand-painted a looser, less rigid version of the check and scattered her own botanical patterns — mimosas, blueberries, rosebuds, vines and violets — across the collection as 3D embroidery, ditsy print and softer, blurred repeats.

Burberry

The show, staged at Chelsea College of Arts near Burberry's London headquarters, put the collaboration on skirt suits in windowpane check overlaid with the embroidered florals, on fluid sheer trenches in pastel blue and aubergine worn over striped dresses, and on skirts covered in sequins or bright red pompoms under short, epaulette jackets. Birtwell also revived a set of round, brightly colored faces from her own archive — drawn some twenty years ago and never produced — which turned up on knitwear and as small medallions hanging off coats and kitten heels. A new version of Burberry's Sloane bag carries her reworked check.

Burberry

Menswear leaned streetwear rather than heritage: trouser chains, denim and cropped jackets, undercut by flowery shirts that gave the silhouette a 1970s tilt to match Birtwell's own era. Central Cee made his Burberry runway debut in the men's lineup, in low-slung jeans and a hooded jacket. The front row read as a bet on cultural reach beyond the usual fashion crowd — Jason Statham, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Skepta, Kano and London mayor Sadiq Khan all attended, seated on wooden benches printed with the house check.

Lee has said the point of bringing in Birtwell was to make the check feel less like a corporate signifier and more like something with a person behind it — his reasoning being that a luxury purchase is an emotional decision rather than a necessity, so the product has to feel human. Birtwell, for her part, has said she was initially unsure what she could add to a pattern that dominant. The result reads as continuity with Lee's other moves at Burberry: since taking over creative direction, he's kept coming back to the trench and the check as the two things worth rebuilding around, rather than layering on new signifiers.

The anniversary framing extends beyond the runway. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is running "The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon," a show of historical and current pieces, through January 3 — a rare instance of a working brand's current-season design being placed in the same room as its own archive while the season is still on sale. For a house whose recent history has been about proving Lee's changes can also move product, a designer collaboration that photographs well and a museum show that legitimizes the archive are both doing real work at once.