Inside Burberry’s lost year — and the battle to bring back its magic
Some fabulous campaigns and you'd think it was doing fine — but Burberry’s year tells a different story.
Editor’s Note (2025)
We first published this investigation in late 2024, at the height of Burberry’s identity crisis.
A year later, as fashion undergoes what editors are calling The Great Fashion Reset — every major house rewriting its codes of taste — the questions feel sharper than ever.
This newly optimised edition updates the data, leadership shifts and mood inside British luxury, and adds fresh context to how a national symbol lost its way.
Because even in a €1.5-trillion industry, the hardest thing to measure is still the magic.
“It’s not a brand that I get asked to look at by my clients, even my high net worth ones,” says Anna Berkeley, personal stylist and Financial Times columnist. “There is literally zero interest.”
Something has gone badly wrong at Burberry, Britain’s only global luxury brand.
The company is now worth around £4.17 billion — down from a peak of nearly £10 billion at the start of 2023.
Retail revenue fell 6 % in Q1 FY26 to £433 million, with comparable store sales down 1 % year-on-year and weakness particularly pronounced in Greater China (–5 %) and Asia Pacific (–4 %).
In May 2025, Burberry announced plans to cut around 1,700 jobs globally — roughly 18 % of its workforce — by 2027, in a bid to save £60 million and refocus investment on product and brand storytelling (Financial Times and The Guardian).
The move underscored just how deep the company’s identity and profitability issues had become.
Before we dive into what’s gone wrong, it’s worth revisiting what we wrote on our About page when Dark Luxury launched:
“Fashion and luxury are not as scientific as other investments because they are 50 per cent art and magic — the untouchable — and 50 per cent business.”
And it’s the “magic” part — the emotional, cultural and aesthetic charge — that Burberry seems to have misplaced.
The Rise and the Romance
Burberry’s modern revival was masterminded by Rose Marie Bravo, the Bronx-born former Saks Fifth Avenue CEO who took over in 1997.
Before her tenure, Burberry was largely a licensing business, its famous check plastered across umbrellas and golf caps.
Bravo bought back licences, moved the brand upmarket and hired Christopher Bailey from Gucci.
Her successor Angela Ahrendts — another American — took the company public and doubled down on one icon: the trench coat.
She and Bailey built a romantic vision of Britishness that resonated globally: rain-washed London streets, golden light, polite melancholy.
“When I first met her, she was absolutely clear,” says Peter Howarth, journalist and CEO of SHOW Media.
“The first outfit in the show is a trench coat. There’s always a trench coat in the campaign. It doesn’t have to be classic — but it has to be a trench coat.”
During that period, Burberry’s market value rose from £2 billion to nearly £7 billion.
It was the definition of bourgeois chic: elegant, emotive, profitable.
When the Weather Turned
The decline began with an identity shift.
Under Riccardo Tisci, Burberry attempted to chase a younger, street-inspired audience.
His successor Daniel Lee, known for his leathercraft at Bottega Veneta, pivoted to handbags and sub-cultural nods — a move that confused core customers and undercut Burberry’s authority in outerwear.
“The campaigns suddenly moved from Hyde Park to Highbury Fields,” says Howarth. “It was about skinheads and working-class cafés. That might suit McQueen or Paul Smith, but was it right for Burberry?”
By 2025, the brand’s creative course had become a proxy for deeper corporate anxieties. Schulman’s cost-cutting plan — including 1,700 layoffs — signalled both discipline and distress, a recognition that too many experiments had blurred the core proposition (FT; Guardian).
The Hedi Question
The most recent collection nodded to Sixties London — sharp tailoring, drainpipe trousers and moody monochrome attitude — but filtered through a lens unmistakably reminiscent of Hedi Slimane.
Within the industry, the whisper is that CEO Joshua Schulman has been quietly courting Slimane to join Burberry.
Insiders suggest Daniel Lee’s latest show was a provocation: a Hedi-esque statement aimed as much at management as the market — a reminder of what they already have.
Hedi, of course, is fashion’s José Mourinho: brilliant, divisive and utterly uncompromising.
His methods are controversial, his vision monolithic, but he wins.
The question is whether that skinny, rock-inflected cool — all cigarette silhouettes and nocturnal glamour — could ever work at Burberry, a house built on daylight, drizzle and restraint.
Whether strategic or self-sabotaging, Lee’s provocation reignited speculation about whether Burberry’s next act will come from within — or whether it’s preparing to appoint yet another creative director.
Is It Always Burberry Weather?
New CEO Joshua Schulman has since promised a return to “the most authentic categories” — trench coats, quilted jackets, outerwear — and vowed to slow expansion in handbags until the core is fixed.
Early signs are mixed.
“The big problem with the trench is that some of my clients already own one,” says Berkeley.
“They last forever. But with the prices now, many say they’ll buy vintage.”
A new Burberry trench retails for around £3,000; a good vintage version sells online for £200–400.
Still, the brand has found traction in tone if not yet in numbers.
Earlier in 2025, Burberry launched “Postcards from London”, a wistful outerwear campaign celebrating its 165-year heritage in weather-proof craftsmanship — the trench, the duffle, the quilting.
Then, for the holidays, came ’Twas The Knight Before…, a star-studded Christmas film directed by Shakespeare in Love’s John Madden and fronted by Jennifer Saunders, with appearances from Naomi Campbell, Ncuti Gatwa, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Son Heung-min (Harper’s Bazaar Arabia; Campaign UK).
Set in a London townhouse where friends gather for laughter, warmth and rain-glossed nostalgia, the spot looked — intentionally or not — like a John Lewis advert remade in trench-coat sepia.
Daniel Lee called it “a party invitation for family and friends, with some great ideas for gifts” (Fashion Network).
The product focus was outerwear: duffles, capes, trenches — a clear signal that Burberry’s heart still lies in protection, heritage and home (Bazaar).
The film has been widely read as a conscious pivot back to sentimentality — proof that when Burberry leans into feeling rather than fashion, audiences respond.
The magic, it turns out, was never gone; it was simply misplaced.
A New Start — or the Last Chance?
Burberry remains a fascinating case study in the volatility of “national” luxury.
It still carries immense symbolic weight — both a mirror and a metaphor for Britain itself.
And like Britain, its challenge is how to modernise without erasing its own mythology.
Maybe that’s why, as one stylist told me recently, “You never completely give up on Burberry. You just wait for it to feel right again.”
Because the trench isn’t just a coat — it’s a promise: of continuity, of romance, of rain that’s always worth dressing up for.
PS
If you read this far, you already understand why taste is never just business.
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