One afternoon in early July, Christopher Bailey, the creative director of Burberry, the British fashion company, pulled his car over to the lip of a ridge near the English village of Warley Town. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he stared out at the Yorkshire moors: hills and valleys, bogs and cloughs, sheep, cows, stone. Grass yielded to rushes and nettles, which gave way to grass again, tufting scarps of millstone grit.
The day was mild. Some sheep, pudgy and deliberate, trudged past the car, a black Mini Cooper. Aero chocolate wrappers and a pair of muddy Wellies littered the floorboard. “Hallo, sheep!” Bailey said. “They’re sweet, huh?” He continued, “You see, it’s so funny when people describe my shows as quite melancholy. A lot of people would describe this as melancholy—but I think it’s so beautiful.” He turned toward the left window. “Look at the hawk!” he said. A hawk swooped at something in the grass. “I think he must have found a rabbit,” Bailey said. The grass shook. “Oh, he’s got him! He’s hurting something down there!”
Many visitors to the moors have sensed in them a mournful quality. To Bailey, the moors—he pronounces the word lowingly, with a “moo”—are a salve. “The smell of manure makes me happy,” he has said. He calls himself a “home bird”; he is at ease mulching or barbecuing or watching TV, “soup on my lap.” Bailey, who was born in Yorkshire, has a cottage in the western part of the county. He spends most weekends there. On a Sunday evening, before heading back to London, he will drive up to the moors, park, and sit for a solitary twenty minutes, watching the rain or hail, or whatever else the day has wrought, beat upon the land.
Bailey is an idealist in a field of cynics, an enthusiast amid the cult of the blasé. It is impossible to read about him without encountering the word “boyish.” He has blond eyebrows, a quick smile, mussed hair the color of hay. He brings to mind a kid on a cereal box, but his diet tends toward Maltesers malt balls. (“I live off chocolate, and it’s really bad—my skin ought to be even worse than it is,” he said.) He is a self-proclaimed “skinny runt.” Speaking of the company’s philanthropic foundation, he delivers, with a straight face, such lines as “We set it up, basically, to be able to give back and to try to help young people and young children.”
Since arriving at Burberry, in 2001, Bailey, who is thirty-eight, has gained a reputation for being, as Details put it last year, “the anti-designer.” It is true that he is unusually solicitous, not only by fashion-designer standards but even by human ones. “Do you want me to hold something?” he will inquire. “Are you cold?” “Would you like a biscuit?” Adrian Hallewell, a chauffeur in Yorkshire, who has known Bailey since he was a boy, told me, “He keeps a low profile, does Christopher.”
Bailey exudes, in the words of the fashion photographer Mario Testino, “a certain peace—you never really see him lose control, get annoyed, get hassled.” The sharpest words I heard him use were “not nice,” speaking of counterfeiters who have co-opted the check that has been the Burberry emblem since 1924. (If you haven’t been to Alice Tully Hall on a rainy night recently, the check consists of a camel-colored background hashed with a grid of black, white, and red stripes.) As the creative director of Burberry, Bailey oversees men’s and women’s collections for four clothing ranges—Burberry Prorsum, a high-fashion line, along with the more casual Burberry London, Burberry Sport, and Burberry Brit—a line of children’s clothing, a line of undergarments, eyewear, watches, perfumes, accessories, advertising campaigns, and, to a large extent, the brand’s image as projected by a hundred and eighteen retail stores, two hundred and fifty-three concessions, and eighty-four franchise outlets in twenty-five countries. One of his prime objectives for Burberry, a three-billion-dollar company, is for it to be “friendly and warm and embracing.” He told me, “I think there’s an expectation that all fashion companies have to be cold and austere and arrogant, and I just think there are other ways of doing things.” Still, Bailey is ambivalent about being cast as the Ryan Seacrest of the runway. He told me, of his nice-guy reputation, “I used to be kind of like, God, that’s really naff.”
Bailey’s aesthetic can be somewhat glum—“drab fab,” people said of a Prorsum show, last year, that featured knit caps, sooty colors, and a runway strewn with dry leaves. “Christopher has a soulful, reflective spirit,” Sally Singer, the fashion-news director of Vogue, told me. “He brought that to a luxury brand at just the right moment, when glitz and bling were on the way out, and he managed to do it in a way that was just downbeat enough.” Bailey is interested in paradoxes—“dishevelled elegance,” “real fashion things against things that have a sense of heritage.” His designs range from muddy floral dresses and luxurious, metallic trenches to, this season, pieces of jewelry inspired by barbed wire. Bailey told me, “I don’t believe that anyone is only super-girly and purely feminine, and only wants to be shy. There are different sides to all our characters.”
Like a synesthete seeing letters in reds or blues, Bailey seems to divine sensory potentials in clothes. “I think, like, wood, or the smell of paper, or that kind of like foisty smell of an old attic,” he said. “Or a thick wool sweater—I want it to smell of wool and I want it to smell of sheep.” His theory of objects—scarves, chairs, marigolds, magpies, picture frames—is almost metaphysical. “Look, I love the way this has gone all shiny and waxed,” he said one day, running a pinkie against the collar of a weather-beaten Burberry trenchcoat. “It’s amazing, with age, how fabric changes. I always like things when they feel like they’ve had a life before.”
Bailey speaks of clothes in pathetic fallacies, attributing to them pasts and futures, personalities, souls. He practices a kind of reverse laundering: he dirties things up, endowing them with baggage and a backstory, most often in the Anglophilic mode. (Madonna, in her lady-of-the-manor phase, outfitted her daughter, Lourdes, in a Burberry kilt.) The British model Stella Tennant, who has been featured in many Burberry ads, and who, for a time, worked as a consultant for the company, used to bring in bits of country-house detritus—a floral-print bedcover, for instance, that her mother had sewn—that she thought Bailey might incorporate into his designs. “Before Christopher, they had a designer, Roberto Menichetti,” Tennant recalled. “He was great, but he was an Italian designer, and they have a completely different feel for clothes. It just made so much more sense having Christopher there, sort of a round peg in a round hole.” She continued, “Even though he can be quite fluid, there’s a structure to what he does, this underlying ghost.”
Last year, Bailey bequeathed the hardware, and the historical patina, of an old Burberry officer’s jacket to a pocketbook—the best-selling Warrior Bag, encrusted with pips. Dylan Jones, the editor of British GQ, said, “Christopher has helped make British fashion exciting again, not by reinventing the wheel, not by being all wiggy and multidirectional, but by inheriting a great British brand and making it relevant for the twenty-first-century customer.” In January, Fashion Wire Daily called Burberry’s men’s show—peacoats, cable sweaters, herringbone dress shirts—“a nostalgic reinterpretation and posh updating of the pre-war English worker, seen through the eyes of the sophisticated urban gent.” The hit item of the collection was a series of snoods. Bailey was inspired, he said, by a hooded parka that Burberry had made for Sir Ernest Shackleton on the eve of his attempted trek across Antarctica in 1914. “That’s what I get from the archives, more than ‘Oh, this is a nice detail,’ ” he told me. “Sometimes it’s the spirit of things.”
Few things please Bailey more than encountering his work in the nooks and crannies of the British experience—a trenchcoat draped over a Westminster politician’s arm, lining out; a checked scarf, worn as hijab, in the immigration queue at Gatwick. A small triumph of his career was spotting a checked purse that he had designed tucked under a table at a bar in Yorkshire. “It was this kind of skanky pub, and all of a sudden I was like, ‘It’s actually amazing that this little baby thing that I work on with my gang goes out into the world and then finds its way back to my home town,’ ” he said. “You want to know the story behind it.”
Up on the moors, Bailey pointed out landmarks—a wind farm, a lake. “There is such a romance here,” he said. He drove by a low drystone wall. Nearby, some cows were grazing. “They’re Herefordshire cows,” Bailey said. “I love these cows.”
May 28, 2009, was, by decree of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Burberry Day in New York City. At 9:23 P.M., Bailey flipped a switch to illuminate three fifty-foot-long signs, spelling out “BURBERRY” in white neon letters, on top of a skyscraper on Madison Avenue—the company’s new American headquarters. The building used to house New York, which had a billboard on the top, so the city had allowed Burberry to erect a sign of its own. When the sign lit up, the effect was almost colonial, the planting of a flag. The weather had gone Londonish, and Bailey was defending the Queen’s English. “People keep saying to me it’s a plaid, and I’m like, ‘No, it’s a check! ’ ” he had said earlier that day.
Across the street, on the roof of the Palace Hotel, which had a good view of the sign, Burberry was hosting a party. A rock band from Yorkshire was playing, amid such guests as Orlando Bloom, Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Blake Lively, and, evidently, a lot of British people—shortly before ten, the bar reportedly went dry. “BURBERRY PARTY—SKYLINE GETS LIT, GUESTS DON’T,” one blog headline read. (A Burberry spokesperson says this is an urban legend.) Helpers trailed the celebrities with check-lined umbrellas. Waiters passed mini shepherd’s pies. Even the loudspeakers, wrapped in plastic, seemed to be wearing raincoats. After a while, the city itself, windowpanes and subway grates, started to appear tessellated—Burberry checks in steel and glass.
The party was a homecoming for Bailey, who began his career as a womenswear designer at Donna Karan. In 1993, Karan had visited the Royal College of Art, in London, where Bailey was a student. He showed her his portfolio. (He’d been thinking about Quakers, and, at the same time, North African and English culture, “these very strong tribal things.”) Bailey recalled, “We stayed there really late, and she took my picture, and said, ‘When you leave school, I want you to come work for me.’ ” Bailey had never been to New York. A year later, he was living in a sixth-floor walkup in Murray Hill. “New York was exactly how I hoped it would be, from the high-rise buildings to the steam coming out of the street, to the noise, to the people shouting at each other and swearing, and everyone walking so quick, to going into a deli,” Bailey said. “I remember almost rehearsing to myself what I wanted to say, like ‘Pastrami on rye. Pastrami on rye.’ ”
In 1996, Bailey moved to Milan, to work as a senior designer at Gucci, under Tom Ford. Bailey was attracted to Ford’s attention to detail, and to the vigor of the brand, but he didn’t identify with Gucci’s decadent look. “While I couldn’t relate to Gucci, I was inspired by it,” he recalled. “It was, How to do that slick, sophisticated, modern glamour in a new way that wasn’t just garish and wasn’t just vulgar? I certainly didn’t live that life—I just imagined it. I imagined, O.K., this sexy girl, what does she want to wear when she’s in the office?”
Weather is to Burberry as sex was to Gucci: the thing without which it would be impossible to imagine the other. (Outerwear, as it’s called, accounts for sixty per cent of the company’s sales of women’s clothing, and forty per cent of men’s.) Burberry was founded in 1856, when Thomas Burberry, a twenty-one-year-old draper’s apprentice, opened a small shop on the high street of a town called Basingstoke. From the beginning, Burberry dedicated himself to devising superior ways of protecting his clientele from the elements. “Open Spaces,” a promotional book published by the company in the early twentieth century, noted:
The elements, in particular, posed a challenge—not only to the British psyche but also to its immune system. People—and, with them, the empire—suffered when, in avoidance of the rain and cold, they wore poorly ventilated clothes and got overheated. Before the breathable waterproof coat became a fashion item, it was a medical and military imperative. In 1880, Burberry—inspired by “smock frocks,” the loose linen garments worn by agricultural workers in Surrey—discovered that Egyptian cotton, when treated with a proprietary solution, kept rain out and let air in. He called the fabric gabardine. Another early corporate book, “Gabardine in Peace and War,” reworked Napoleon’s purported dictum: “An army goes upon its belly, but its skin must be covered.” It asserted, of gabardine, “The direct benefits it has conferred upon the human race will, it is to be hoped, last quite as long as those derived from the world’s decisive battles.” Burberry was the DuPont of its day, both an enabler and an avatar of national progress.
Burberry established his first shop in London in 1891, at 30 Haymarket, in the city’s West End. By then, Burberry’s, as it was known, was offering kit “FOR SPORT, COUNTRY, TRAVEL, TOWN, MILITARY, and including COURT AND MUFTI.” The company embodied the can-do spirit of the age. In 1910, it outfitted the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen with windproof anoraks for his expedition to the South Pole. “For sledge journeys, where one has to save weight, and to work in loose, easy garments, I must unhesitatingly recommend Burberry,” Amundsen wrote. Burberry also equipped Robert Scott for his ill-fated Antarctic journey. A picture taken on January 17, 1912, shows Scott’s sledge party posing at the bottom of the world. (Amundsen had beaten them by thirty-four days.) The men wear mufflers, and harnesses across their shoulders to support heavy mitts. Many of them had taken to tying gabardine bags around their fur boots, like gaiters. The temperature is twenty degrees below zero. A breeze ruffles the Union Jack, staked in the ice.
Amundsen and his ilk were the turn-of-the-century’s Michael Jordans, and gabardine its Nike Airs. With the explorers’ endorsement, Burberry’s élite athletic apparel caught on with the leisure classes, becoming as coveted in the provinces as it had been at the poles. “It has saved me many a wetting, and doesn’t give me a steam bath and a cold like my mackintosh did,” T.H.W., from Sheffield, wrote, in a letter to the company, of his gabardine coat. J.W.B., of Horsham, attested, “It is splendid for walking, does not clog the legs, nor produce perspiration.”
Equestrians, country doctors, hot-air balloonists, sailors, golfers, cyclists, and vicars all loved their Burberrys. The Prince of Wales ordered one. So did the Infanta of Spain, thirteen marquesses, and the Maharaja Bahadur, of Jammu and Kashmir. The magazine Badminton praised the coat for “keeping the wearer dry without baking, boiling, or stewing him.” The coat, which Court Journal called “a veritable suit of mail,” was said to protect against thorn, bramble, burrs, fish hooks, heather, tornadoes, monsoons, typhoons, dust, and rheumatism. The Morning Post sponsored a limerick competition:
During the Boer War, British troops had taken to wearing a Burberry coat called the Tielocken, which fastened at the waist with a sash instead of buttons, providing wraparound coverage. (During the Matabele campaign, cavalry officers reportedly carried Tielockens rolled up on the pommels of their saddles.) Before the First World War, the British War Office commissioned Burberry to make a coat for its officers. Burberry added to the Tielocken silhouette shoulder straps (for epaulets) and D-rings (for satchels to hold hand grenades, compasses, canteens, or whatever else the subaltern required). The resulting garment, which was offered for private purchase, became known as the “trench coat.” Later additions included gun flaps and cuff straps, the vestiges of which are visible in the coats that office workers favor today.
The Burberry diaspora, as evoked by testimonial letters sent to the company, mirrored Britain’s: Salonika, Ceylon, Burma, Formosa, Constantinople, Borneo, the Orange Free State. From Somaliland, a Mr. Wm. Eglington wrote of having “gone through mimosas and the dreaded ‘watch-een-beetje’ bushes with the most perfect immunity, when other garments as well as khaki would have been torn to shreds.” From South Africa came word of a “gallant little mare” whose owner had named her Gabardine.
Until recently, Burberry’s worldwide corporate headquarters comprised five offices scattered around London, furnished in various schemes of wainscoting and brass. In November, amid the institution of a hundred-million-dollar cost-efficiency plan, the company moved to Horseferry House, a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-foot former government building in Westminster. (You have to spend before you save, the thinking apparently went.) The new building, designed by Bailey in collaboration with the architectural firm Gensler, houses eight floors of design studios, showrooms, and executive offices arranged around two light-filled atriums. Bailey attended to the most niggling details of its construction: glass doors on the premises feature, instead of what he called “the usual little circles or something horrible,” required by safety codes, etchings of a stylized raker stripe, the red line that bisects the Burberry check.
One afternoon in July, Bailey greeted me in a reception room on the ground floor. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, green-and-black striped socks, and a tailored blazer. Rolling racks laden with selections from the Burberry archives lined the room. “Shall I show you around?” Bailey said. “Brilliant!”
During his first few months at Burberry, Bailey often took lunch in the archives—him, some coats, and a sandwich. Now he led the way toward a rack and pulled out a yellow trenchcoat, the color of corn. “This we made for ‘Dick Tracy,’ the movie, which is fun, no?” he said. He plucked another coat from the rack, a single-breasted orange number from the nineteen-forties. The coat looked blanched, as if it had sat out in the sun for days, or been dipped in salt water and allowed to dry. “I love this one,” Bailey said. “What we did, one season, we worked with a textile company in Italy which does dyes reactive to light, to kind of give it the same effect.”
In the reception room, Bailey tugged at the sleeve of a coat. A manila tag attached to the collar said that it was from 1908 and had belonged to a member of the 18th Hussars. He plunged his hand into an internal pocket, which, he marvelled, had been designed deep enough to hold a newspaper. When Bailey becomes excited, he slides his feet wide, like a tennis player skidding on clay. By the time he brought up a very special entry in the Burberry collection—“I’ll get into trouble if I say it, but, basically, it’s the Queen’s trenchcoat that she had when she was shooting, and it looks like there’s some blood on it!”—he was practically doing a split.
Bailey has a spiel about the trenchcoat and, by extension, the Burberry brand: it’s for the young, it’s for the old, it’s for the country, it’s for the city, it’s timeless, it’s ageless, it’s been worn by everyone from Princess Margaret to Sid Vicious. Until recently, though, Burberry was seen by the fashion world as a stodgy nonentity. In 1997, the company—which since 1955 had been owned by Great Universal Stores, a British retail conglomerate—hired Rose Marie Bravo, a Bronx-born former Saks Fifth Avenue executive, as C.E.O. Her mandate was to transform the company into a modern luxury brand. The next year, Burberry introduced Prorsum (“forward” in Latin) and changed its name, becoming, officially, Burberry, rather than Burberrys. It stepped up its marketing, hiring Mario Testino to shoot advertising campaigns, and populating the ads with aristocrats (Lord Frederick Windsor), models (Kate Moss), and aristocratic models (Stella Tennant). In September of 1999, when Hurricane Floyd hit the East Coast, Burberry gave trenchcoats to thirty New York fashion editors, according to Henrik Vejlgaard’s “Anatomy of a Trend.” (A basic model, the classic double-breasted trench, costs seventeen hundred and ninety-five dollars.) In 2002, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange. Between 2003 and 2006 the company’s net profit quadrupled.
Bravo, who left in 2006, revived Burberry; the mission of her successor, Angela Ahrendts, as she put it in a recent report to shareholders, is “to purify the brand’s message.” Ahrendts, also an American, and a former Liz Claiborne executive, joined the company in 2006, at the urging—over a three-hour lunch at Asiate—of Bailey, who had worked with her at Donna Karan. Since taking over, Ahrendts has discontinued thirty-five of the brand’s product categories. “We absolutely said we would eliminate what we called ancillary products,” she told me. Bailey’s task is to rid the company of aesthetic clutter. “Burberry used to do little bottles of whiskey,” he said. “We’re not experts on whiskey, so why the hell would we do whiskey?”
In 2006, Burberry announced that it would close a polo-shirt factory in an industrial area of Wales, eliminating three hundred jobs, which could be performed more cheaply elsewhere. Soon, the workers, sympathetic, cup-of-tea sorts, were protesting outside the factory. Prince Charles took up the cause, and the entertainers Emma Thompson, Ioan Gruffudd, and Tom Jones joined a campaign to “Keep Burberry British.” Burberry closed the factory anyway. In 2008, Bailey told the Daily Mail, “We have two factories in Yorkshire—in Rotherham, which we saved from closure, and Castleford, where we make the iconic rainwear. We still use fabrics from the traditional cloth mills.” A year later, Burberry announced that it would close the Rotherham plant. Many of the employees learned the news on TV. One machinist told the Guardian that the workers had taken to comparing themselves to mushrooms—“You know, kept in the dark and fed on whatsit.”
Burberry, despite having earned more than two billion dollars in revenue for the first time, ended the 2008 fiscal year with a loss of eight million dollars. The deficit was not dire, or wholly unanticipated—there were the new buildings, and the institution of the cost-efficiency plan—but it reflected the soured economy, which has at least slightly dampened the company’s ambitions. “We absolutely want to continue the retail expansion,” Bailey told me. “Maybe it’s not as aggressive as it was, but we still want to keep moving forward with it.”
The thing, for a fashion house, about having a recognizable logo is that it’s recognizable: Burberry at a glance. This can be a boon to its image: see Prince Charles and Princess Diana, wearing matching Burberry raincoats, umbrellas held aloft, on what looks like a dismal vacation in 1983, or Susan Boyle, post-spiffing, accessorizing her leather jacket with a Burberry scarf. During Rose Marie Bravo’s tenure, the company strove for visibility, plastering the Burberry check on a string bikini. But the conspicuousness of the pattern also means that the company has little control over how it is seen, or on whom. Anthony Marshall, on the way to his trial for allegedly defrauding his mother, Brooke Astor, of millions of dollars, draped a Burberry coat over his arm. Presiding over the now infamous slaughter of Thanksgiving turkeys, Sarah Palin wore what appeared to be the company’s cashmere muffler. A commenter, having watched the video online, wrote, “It’s very thoughtful of Sarah that her Burberry scarf matches the bucket of blood in the background.”
On October 31, 2002, the “EastEnders” soap-opera star Danniella Westbrook went shopping on Bond Street. The next day, a picture of her appeared in tabloids across England. Westbrook, who had just undergone an operation to repair her septum, damaged from years of cocaine use, wore knee-high boots, black windowpane tights, and a short pleated skirt printed in the beige-black-and-red Burberry check. She carried a Burberry-checked handbag, which blended into the Burberry-checked kilt that her one-year-old daughter was wearing, as Westbrook balanced her on a shoulder after lifting her out of a Burberry-checked pram. British people still haven’t got over it. Last year, a poll by the Sun found “the infamous check pattern” the worst fashion faux pas of the past fifty years, beating out “the shell suit, puffa jackets, and even Crocs.”
The Westbrook incident may have marked the beginning of what became a public-relations crisis for Burberry: the appropriation of the brand by the so-called “chav,” which is British, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for a “young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes.” Others say that it all started with a ninety-dollar checked cap adopted by a group of football hooligans who called themselves the Burberry Boys and assaulted a busload of Turkish fans at an England-Turkey match. For that reason, or another, the hat became the favored accessory of chavs, or chavlike persons, just as chav culture—typified by WAGs (the purportedly label-mad wives and girlfriends of the English national-team players), Jade Goody, and “The Catherine Tate Show”—was becoming a phenomenon.
Burberry discontinued the hat in 2004, but the perception that the brand had descended into cheesiness had taken hold. In an article called “Burberry vs. the Chavs” (graphic: a woman with Burberry-patterned acrylic nails), the BBC Web site reported that pubs and clubs around the country had started to ban customers dressed in Burberry, and that the brand, “a victim of its own success,” had become “something of a national joke.” The Welsh rap group Goldie Lookin Chain offered for sale on eBay a “Chavalier”—a 1991 Vauxhall Cavalier replete with a checked paint job and, according to the listing, bottles of Carlsberg and lotto scratch tickets on the floor. (Burberry sued, successfully, to have the car destroyed.) A coffee shop in Kent added to its menu “chavuccino”: coffee and Red Bull served on a Burberry-style napkin. Students at a boarding school conducted a “chav hunt,” in which one side, dressed in hunting pinks, chased their Burberry-clad classmates on horseback. When the company’s C.F.O., Stacey Cartwright, was asked about the chav problem by the Independent, in 2004, she replied, “It won’t have helped, I’m sure.”
Unlike the champagne producer Louis Roederer—which drew scorn from Jay-Z when, in 2006, its C.E.O. told a reporter that he viewed the hip-hop community’s affinity for Cristal with “curiosity and serenity”—Burberry, smartly, has tried to present the dilution of its brand as a piracy issue: a scourge of undesirable products, not undesirable people. “I think that probably a lot of it was counterfeit,” Bailey said, when I asked him about the perception of the brand as “checks for chavs.” He went on, culminating in the observation that “the U.K. is about seven to ten per cent of our business, so, you know, it was just a little thing happening here.” In any case, Burberry has become vigilant about its trademark. In 2005, the company threatened legal action against Ferret World, a pet shop in Dudley, West Midlands, for advertising fur-lined caps—for ferrets—“in the famous Burberry design.”
The idea that Burberry—at least in its mass-market incarnations—can lack edge, or sophistication, is not limited to the U.K. Part of this is the check, and particularly the checked scarf, a wintertime ubiquity in the commuting precincts of our Northeastern seaboard. (If you asked me to conjure a stereotypical Burberry-scarf wearer, it would be someone who spends a lot of time on the Acela shuttle between New York and D.C.) In 2007, a Boston Facebook user started a clothes drive he called “Burberry Scarves for Darfur”: “You know what Darfur has too much of?” he wrote. “Genocide. You know what Boston has too much of? Burberry scarves.” In a way, Burberry is the English Ralph Lauren, a safe option that anyone can pull off. (Tony Blair, for instance, wore a check-placketed polo shirt for a visit to Silvio Berlusconi’s villa.) Bailey once told a reporter, “I’m not somebody who believes in putting men in skirts.” He is also not, however—as evidenced by a recent ad for Saks Fifth Avenue—averse to putting someone in a Burberry-checked high-top sneaker, “hand-sprayed to give it a slight degradé effect.”
Bailey is a committed anti-élitist. “I’m not going to get into labels like WAG, because it’s derogatory, and maybe I’m part of that culture, because I came from a working-class background in Yorkshire and now I eat at the Wolseley,” Bailey told an interviewer, in 2007. Bailey’s father, Doug, now retired, was a carpenter; his mother, Eliana, dressed windows for Marks & Spencer. Bailey, as a teen-ager, thought he might become a veterinarian. On weekends, he worked at a wedding-dress shop. “I had some of the most awkward moments in the middle of these two quite strong women, where the mother wanted her daughter to look absolutely Victorian and covered up to the neck, and the daughter wanted her boobs out,” he recalled. “The biggest thing for me there was to understand the psychology of clothes.”
Burberry has a long tradition of accessibility—“Everything will be marked in plain figures throughout the establishment,” one of the company’s early ads promised—and Bailey sees himself as a custodian of the idea that nice things aren’t solely for people “with gazillions of pounds.” His philosophy, he said, was stoked by an experience he had when he was sixteen and living in London, attending art school. He recalled, “My dad wanted to buy my mum a really beautiful watch from this designer store, and my dad sent me the money. And, you know, this was a really expensive watch. Maybe for other people it wasn’t a lot of money, but in our world it was, and it was really special for my dad to be able to do this.”
Bailey went to the store, dressed, “you know, like a normal person.” He recalled, “The service was so intimidating and so unpleasant and so un-what-it-should-have-been. And I really wanted to call my dad afterward and say, ‘Dad, it was amazing, and there was this and there was that!’ But instead I was like, ‘Oh, Dad, it was awful. It was horrible.’ ” It is Burberry company policy that several sizes of each garment be available on store floors so that customers don’t have to talk to the salespeople if they don’t want to.
Back at Horseferry House, in London, Bailey proceeded to a smallish, dark room: the company’s in-house photo studio. “Basically, we set this up so we can control everything,” he said. “We do all photo shoots here, we do everything for e-commerce here, we do post- and preproduction.” Vertical integration is a familiar strategy in most industries, but Burberry is one of the few fashion companies to have embraced it. (Anything that saves money is considered inherently suspect by fashion’s ancien régime.) Bailey entered another room, which contained what appeared to be a fake store window. It was. “What we do is create everything here, from lights to mannequins,” Bailey said. The team at Horseferry, he explained, comes up with concepts for the company’s store windows, builds them in three dimensions, and then sends photographs and detailed instructions for assembly to every Burberry store in the world. It was Bailey’s idea to hold Burberry’s store windows to the same level of standardization as, say, McDonald’s hamburgers. “If I go to a Burberry store in Shanghai, I don’t want to walk past their window and see a shabby version of this,” he said.
In the company café, a few employees were having espresso. “Buon appetito! ” Bailey said.
He walked over to a nearby console: forks, napkins, microwave. “I hate microwaves,” he said. “So, look, I did these!” He pressed a button, and the microwave disappeared behind a tasteful oak veneer. Recycling is mandatory in the building. To encourage paperlessness, Bailey had banished trash cans, and prohibited employees from having printers near their desks. Fashion people often display a willful ignorance about technology: the favored mode of communication among several titans of the industry is the fax. But Bailey calls himself “a bit of a nightmare kind of Google person,” and has been known to stare at a computer, he says, “until I’ve got red eyes literally bulging out of my head.”
Bailey is a pragmatist. “I love the whole creative process, but not in a kind of wanky way,” he told me. His attitude toward his vocation is workmanlike. “I don’t think you wake up and say, ‘I’m feeling a little bit “Grey Gardens” today,’ ” he said. “I find it a bit contrived sometimes—for me. Everybody has a different process.” (He is not above ginning up some references after the fact. A tip sheet distributed by Burberry revealed that inspirations for his Fall 2009 collection were, supposedly, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and the Countess of Devon.)
In 2005, Bailey’s partner, Geert Cloet, who worked as the brand director for Miu Miu, died, of a brain tumor. “Work was, absolutely . . . I buried myself in work,” Bailey told me. “I just kind of threw myself into things, because, you know, I think sometimes there’s a sense of failing.”
Bailey and his designers work in a series of studios on the seventh floor. In the knitwear section, Bailey stopped in front of an island table laden with fabric swatches. He homed in on a dusky-blue silk cotton and pawed at a string of light-blue sequins coiled on top of it. “We need to make it more three-dimensional,” Bailey said. “We need more texture.” He picked up the sequins and let them drop, as though he were making a drip castle. “But this is too much.” Someday, this would become a sweater.
Nearby, a bunch of bags and belts sat on a counter. Bailey is an intuitive designer—a craftsman more than an artist, a learn-as-you-go tinkerer. To translate ideas into three dimensions, he and his design team practice a sort of fashion bricolage. “We might draw something, we might do it on the computer, sometimes we might make it out of paper,” he said. He picked up a black leather purse. A thin strip of leather ran, veinlike, across the bottom. “Like this,” Bailey said. “We often just start knotting and playing and then imagine, Hey, what if this was like this? And we often cello-tape things on and then carefully take them to the factory in Italy and say, ‘O.K., how can we industrially do this?’ ”
He was unhappy with the vein. “Ugh, it’s horrendous. It feels like it’s stuck onto the bag, instead of part of the bag,” he said. “So now I’ve just told the guys, let’s just whipstitch it.” Sitting nearby was a soft, slouchy tote bag, one of the most beautiful bags I have ever seen. It was made of yellow leather, pale as a sorbet, and its surface had been shaved, or chiffonaded, so that it appeared to be covered in thousands of eyelashes.
A small staircase led to a roof terrace. From it, we could see the Houses of Parliament, Lambeth Palace, the London Eye Ferris wheel glinting in the sun. Bailey walked toward a ledge and looked out at the Thames. “I remember very vividly I grew up in a bedroom that was, I mean, literally, from here to there,” he said, tracing a perimeter on the wooden deck with his foot. “On the wall I would make collages. I remember I once found this really beautiful chain and hammered it into the wall. My dad went ballistic, and my mother tried to say, ‘Leave him, he’s got to express himself,’ and my dad thought I was a nutter.” He continued, “It’s all kind of a dream for me.”
After a few minutes on the roof, we went to Bailey’s office. Neil Young was playing on an iPod. Some Maltesers sat on top of an otherwise immaculate desk. “Would you like coffee, water, tea?” Bailey asked, after apologizing to his secretary for running late. I said I’d like some water. Bailey got the water, and, pouring, missed the glass. In a second, he was down on his knees, cheerfully blotting the puddle with a paper towel. ♦
