Burberry

Thomas Burberry was a 21-year-old draper's apprentice when he opened his own outfitting shop in Basingstoke, Hampshire, in 1856. Country people and sportsmen were his customers, and he noticed that the linen smocks of shepherds and farm labourers kept out the weather far better than the rubberised coats of the day, which were heavy and did not breathe. In 1879 he developed gabardine, a tightly woven twill whose yarn was waterproofed before weaving, and patented it in 1888. In 1891 he opened a shop in the Haymarket in London, still home to a Burberry store.

Gabardine went to the ends of the earth. Polar explorers including Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton wore it, and in the years before and during the First World War Burberry supplied officers with weatherproof coats whose epaulettes, D-rings and storm flaps gave the trench coat its name and its form. The Equestrian Knight emblem, carrying the Latin word Prorsum, "forwards", was devised in 1901, and in the 1920s the house introduced the camel, black, white and red check as a coat lining.

Burberry remained independent until 1955, when Great Universal Stores bought it. The trench coat became a screen staple, worn by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the house collected royal warrants. But by the 1990s the brand depended heavily on licences and on the check, which was widely counterfeited. Rose Marie Bravo, hired as chief executive in 1997, began to reposition it as a luxury house, and Burberry listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2002.

Christopher Bailey, a Yorkshire-born designer from Gucci, joined as creative director in 2001. With Angela Ahrendts, chief executive from 2006, he rebuilt Burberry around the trench coat and its British heritage, revived the Prorsum line, cast young British faces in its campaigns and pushed the house early into digital media, livestreamed shows and, in 2016, "see now, buy now" collections. Bailey became chief executive himself in 2014 when Ahrendts left for Apple, and stepped down from the house at the end of 2017.

Riccardo Tisci, formerly of Givenchy, arrived in 2018 as chief creative officer. He commissioned the graphic designer Peter Saville to create a new sans-serif logo and a Thomas Burberry monogram, and steered the house towards streetwear. In October 2022 Burberry appointed Daniel Lee, previously of Bottega Veneta, who revived the Equestrian Knight and a serif wordmark, introduced a vivid "Knight blue" and returned the collections to outerwear and British country dress. His first show, in February 2023, was staged in a tent in Kennington Park. Under chief executive Joshua Schulman, appointed in 2024, the house has refocused on its coats, scarves and check.