Té och sympati

Bailey, like many of his countrymen, has a fondness for sartorial flamboyance. For fall, he showed trench coats in houndstooth and quilted satin. Yet his instinct is to avoid artifice even as he admits it in a shocking, Hockney-esque hue. It’s this tension, between the purely eccentric and the resolutely practical, that keeps Bailey separate from other luxury-goods designers. As Sarah Mower, a London-based writer for American Vogue, said, ”I think Christopher’s done a great thing by looking at the icons, like the trench, and just bringing it all down.” Bailey told me: ”This sounds silly to say, but our challenge at Burberry is to make something that doesn’t look designer. And it’s got nothing to do with the money aspect of fashion. There’s almost a crassness to something being typically designer.” But this indifference to material possessions, however calculated, is also a very British attitude.