Horseferry House has been the home of Burberry since 2009: a 160,000 square foot 1930s red-brick office building, with a former life as government offices — a grand institution, in Her Majesty's service — it rises from behind an imposing lower façade of raindrop-pocked beige sandstone. That is almost the exact same shade as the gabardine Burberry uses to craft its classic trench coat, a garment so central to the company's repute — not to mention its country of origin's permanently rain-soaked identity — many still colloquially call it a “Burberry”. Inside Burberry HQ, the mood switches, though: reconfigured from boxy civil service cubicles to open-plan modernity, the space is today hung with vast panels of white stamped with vibrant cobalt, a shade introduced by Burberry's new chief creative officer, Daniel Lee, when he joined the company in October last year. He has since named it “Knight” blue — a play on royal blue, the colour was found in the archive. Almost half a century on and, today, Knight blue etches out a horse bearing a jousting figure in medieval armour, a device famous and familiar, especially to the British, from the labels of trench coats old and new hanging in wardrobes for decades. Bearing a pennant marked “Prorsum” — the Latin word for forwards — the Equestrian Knight Design (EKD) has been Burberry's insignia since 1901. Here and now, it is not only recoloured, but its meaning is reconsidered, much as Lee is reconsidering Burberry top to bottom, seam by seam, from the outside in.
“In my first days at the brand I looked into the archive,” he says. He has much to say about Burberry in words, though more through the work he is creating. “Burberry is such an evocative name and I had my own associations with things. For me the knight was a powerful symbol of the brand. I don't know if we consciously started with the branding. It was more of a wipe-the-slate-clean approach, more about bringing Burberry back to somewhere I felt familiar with.”
In many ways, Lee, who is 37, is the ultimate 21st-century designer. It wasn't so very long ago that the word “branding” was frowned upon. But: “I love smart branding,” he says. In 2018 Burberry's then powers that be got rid of any horsiness; they also renamed Burberry — traditionally, simply a company, then outfitter — a “house”. Lee, though, speaks a different language: of product, not couture (it's true that without the haute it doesn't have quite the same ring to it), of quality as well as luxury, of signifiers and meaning more than trends and elevation, of democracy not elitism, and, most often, of Britishness in all its incarnations: there are so many of those.
Perhaps in this context, they begin with notions of creativity: the British reputation for
