From Trenches to Trust Funds: War, Wealth and the Making of a Fashion Icon

There’s a particular smell to a Burberry trench coat — faint rain, mothballs, and inherited expectation. The fabric is thick with legacy, the kind that doesn’t wrinkle easily. You could wrap yourself in it and feel, for a moment, like history’s favourite child: a little weathered, a little noble, and somehow mysteriously above reproach. It is the uniform of the quietly rich and the aspirationally beige. But behind the polished buttons and the understated check lies a more complicated tale: one stitched not in silk, but in survival. And yet, by the time the 20th century had truly found its horrors, Burberry was no longer just a shield against drizzle. It was on the backs of soldiers in the trenches, explorers in the Arctic, kings, queens, and eventually, private schoolboys caught between lacrosse practice and existential dread.

Somewhere along the muddy path from No Man’s Land to Knightsbridge, the brand became less about weather and more about weathering — class, scrutiny, even its own popularity. What does it mean when something built for war becomes a symbol of quiet wealth? When utility is rebranded as elegance? When a working-class invention ends up in the wardrobes of people who’ve never needed to work at all?

This is a story about transformation. About how fabric becomes myth, how history gets dry-cleaned, and how one coat managed to march through class, conflict, and cultural upheaval, only to end up draped over the arm of someone called Hugo, who says he’s “in finance” but really just reads The Spectator and owns three Labradors.

Burberry is more than just a trench coat. It’s a question in beige. 

Stormproof and Socially Mobile: Thomas Burberry’s Humble Beginnings

Before Burberry was a byword for British luxury, before it was folded into Mayfair wardrobes and Sloane Square Christmases, it was a problem-solving exercise in Basingstoke. The man behind the label, Thomas Burberry, did not come from the social strata that would one day idolise his work. He was the son of a nonconformist shepherd and a grocer — a man born not into grandeur but into damp mornings, frugal ambition, and a culture that valued endurance over elegance. If you squint, you can still see the mud on the hem.

The irony is delicious. A boy from Hampshire sets out to keep working men dry and ends up clothing the sons of bankers, baronets, and backbench Tories. Not bad for someone who didn’t grow up with foxhunting weekends and a silver-plated hip flask.

Burberry opened his first outfitter’s shop in 1856, not with a vision of runway dominance but with a practical curiosity. He had his eyes set on the real British weather, not the metaphorical storms of fashion weeks and PR scandals. Rain. Wind. General dampness. He wasn’t interested in ornament, but in function. In keeping people alive, dry, and able to go about their business without catching pneumonia on the way to post a letter. There’s something gloriously Protestant about it all: solve a problem, do it well, then get on with your life.

Then came gabardine.

Gabardine didn’t sparkle. It didn’t seduce. It didn’t lounge. It worked. A tightly woven, weatherproof fabric that breathed just enough to keep a person both dry and mobile. It wasn’t merely innovative; it was oddly moral, as though it had been invented by someone who believed that suffering through the weather was character-building but not mandatory. In many ways, gabardine was a textile sermon: practical, resilient, unflashy, and quietly revolutionary.

And with it, Burberry did what the English middle class has always done best — he climbed. But his ascent was not one of champagne and elbow rubs. It was stitched slowly, methodically, as if the fabric of gabardine had woven itself into his own ambition. What began as a coat for farmers and country doctors soon became the uniform of explorers, officers, and anyone brave or mad enough to face the elements. Shackleton wore Burberry. So did Scott. So did the soldiers of the First World War, who trudged through mud and blood wrapped in the practicality of Burberry’s invention.

The trench coat was born not in Savile Row, but in sandbags and strategy. Designed for British officers, the coat included epaulettes for rank, D-rings for grenades, and a storm flap for, well, actual storms. It was functional, unglamorous, and devastatingly stylish — though no one would have dared say so aloud at the time. There’s something about facing death in a perfectly cut coat that makes you believe civilisation might survive after all.

And survive it did. Though the coat, like the country, evolved. Once the war was over, the trench coat didn’t disappear into military surplus bins. It slouched onto the streets. It reappeared in cinemas and corridors of power. It was repurposed not just as outerwear, but as aspiration. By the 1950s, it had already begun its transformation, from field gear to fashion staple. And while Thomas Burberry himself didn’t live to see this shift in full bloom, it’s hard not to wonder what he might’ve thought, watching aristocrats and debutantes wearing his coats with the kind of effortless confidence that only comes from not needing to check the price tag.

There’s a peculiar poetry in the arc: a man who designed for endurance ends up designing for elegance. His innovation, born of practicality, gets repackaged as prestige. Survival becomes swagger. The raincoat becomes a relic. What once kept the working man dry now becomes a shorthand for a certain kind of Britishness — reserved, understated, and deceptively expensive.

But maybe that’s the magic of Burberry. It doesn’t scream. It whispers. And in that whisper lies a legacy: stitched by a grocer’s son in Basingstoke, worn by kings and commoners alike, shielding everyone from a country that has never quite decided whether it’s drizzling or not.

Trench Warfare and Trench Chic: From Soldiers to Socialites

Somewhere between the mud of the Somme and the entrance at Annabel’s, the trench coat lost its gun but kept its gravity. It’s a peculiar thing — watching a garment march from battlefield to brunch table, still carrying the echoes of war but now paired with suede loafers and a decaf oat latte. Once a symbol of duty and survival, the trench coat now flutters behind men whose greatest daily threat is a delayed Ocado delivery.

But it began, of course, with war. Grim, grotty, soul-curdling war. The trench coat was born not out of aesthetic musings, but out of sheer necessity, the kind that doesn’t care for drape or drama, only that your limbs remain attached and your torso dry. Burberry’s design for British officers was intended to be functional: storm flaps for water, epaulettes for rank, D-rings for equipment, a belt to cinch against wind and existential dread. It was armour, minus the steel. A wearable foxhole.

And yet, war, for all its horror, has always had a strange relationship with fashion. What begins as brutal utility often morphs, decades later, into style. Camouflage trousers. Bomber jackets. The trench coat. Somewhere along the line, the blood is washed out and replaced with symbolism. Prestige, edge, a brush of rebellion, a stiff upper lip sewn into every seam. The horror is softened by nostalgia, and the garment becomes aesthetic property. The trench coat, in particular, carries with it the ghosts of both defiance and dignity — a sartorial wink that says, “I could handle a storm, if I had to.”

By the 1920s, the war was over, but the trench was just getting started. Officers returned home, their coats in tow, and instead of being discarded with old uniforms, the trench began appearing in everyday life. Maybe it was the way it swung with purpose. Maybe it was the military lineage that gave it gravitas. Or maybe, deep down, Britain simply cannot resist a narrative of survival turned sophistication.

What is truly fascinating is the way the trench coat refused to be defined by its origins. It adapted, almost slyly. Worn over suits in the City, or over knickers and cigarettes in 1960s Soho. From noir detectives to new romantics, the trench whispered something different each decade, never raising its voice, always letting its heritage do the talking. It became the uniform of the understated, those who wanted to suggest power without shouting, who preferred to arrive unannounced but unmistakably dressed.

And then, slowly, it slithered up the social ladder. Onto the shoulders of the old money, the new money, and those aspiring to seem like either. The same coat that once bore the weight of artillery maps now carries the scent of Creed Aventus. It’s been spotted on front-row fashion editors and sopping-wet Labradors, tucked into Range Rovers or trailing behind cigarette breaks outside Oxford colleges. Somehow, against all odds, it became sexy.

There’s a particular kind of man, the Mayfair type (which I unfortunately interact with when I’m in London… not by choice), who wears his trench coat like a generational burden he secretly adores. He’ll mutter something about “functionality” and “bloody weather,” but he’s fully aware that the collar popped just-so makes him look like he could recite Kipling while ordering a martini. It’s both performance and inheritance — a way to gesture toward toughness without ever having to prove it.

The trench coat is a paradox, really. As rugged as it is refined. It carries the gravitas of war but flirts with elegance. It nods to hardship while being priced for comfort. It’s a relic with a résumé, and that résumé includes both military commendations and Harrods receipts.

But perhaps that’s why it’s endured. It bridges something peculiarly British: the worship of weather, the romance of restraint, the ability to look emotionally unavailable but oddly dashing. The trench coat doesn’t just keep you dry, it keeps you dignified. It allows you to glide rather than scurry, even in the pouring rain. It suggests preparedness without panic, confidence without flamboyance.

And in a way, isn’t that what class signalling has always been about? The trench coat says, “I’ve been through something,” whether that ‘something’ was a war or a particularly taxing brunch reservation system. It doesn’t matter anymore. The coat carries the story, even if you don’t. You simply slip it on, cinch the belt, and step out into the drizzle like someone who’s survived worse, and looked good doing it.

The Private School Peacocks: Burberry and the Cult of British Class

Burberry doesn’t shout. It murmurs in low vowels and inherited vowels, in the language of pewter cutlery, wet dogs, and term breaks in the Cotswolds. It isn’t flashy. It’s quietly expensive. It dresses like someone who doesn’t need to explain their importance, because the family portrait in the drawing room already did.

At some point, likely between the end of the war and the beginning of the hedge fund era, Burberry tiptoed into the wardrobes of Britain’s most institutionally groomed. The private school set. The chin-up crowd. The ones for whom beige isn’t bland but a birthright. It wrapped itself around Etonian shoulders and Chelsea mothers with smooth hair and unhurried afternoons. Somewhere along the line, the trench coat stopped being about the weather and started being about the postcode.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what, precisely, made Burberry the house mascot for old money affectation. Is it the stone-coloured palette that feels vaguely country-house hallway? The cinched waist that mimics cavalry elegance without the bother of horses? The subtle implication that you could dash from a boardroom to a moor at any moment, should the need arise? Or is it simply that it’s been worn by enough people with baronets in the family that its fabric absorbed the lineage?

The irony is that Burberry was not designed for these people. Not originally. It was built, stitch by stitch, by a working-class man from Basingstoke, invented to keep farmers and foot soldiers dry, not heirs to biscuit fortunes. And yet, like so many things in Britain, it was eventually reclassified, reframed, and refracted through the prism of class. Like wellies at Glastonbury or marmalade in minimalist jars, utility was rebranded as style.

You see it most clearly in the hallways of private schools and Oxbridge colleges. The boys, still pink-cheeked from rugby or Latin, depending on the hour, wear their trenches open just enough to reveal a navy jumper and a knowing smirk. It’s not meant to look considered. That’s the point. To look as though one stumbled into style while reading something out of print.

The trench coat in these circles becomes less about weather resistance and more about mood. It’s autumn in human form. A visual sigh. A polite way to armour oneself against both rain and overfamiliarity. And crucially, it offers plausible deniability: if someone notices you’re dressed rather well, you can always blame the weather. Britishness at its peak.

But what happens when a brand tries to escape its own cult? When Burberry, in its many eras of reinvention, tried to unzip the country club costume and slip into something more current? In the early 2000s, the baseball caps, the scandalous splash of nova check, the tabloids wringing their hands. A pattern that once whispered heritage began to bellow rebellion. It terrified the upper crust and thrilled the streets. Suddenly, Burberry wasn’t just the scent of rain on tweed, it was also trackies and Timberlands. The aristocracy was appalled.

Burberry’s dance with modernity has always been an awkward waltz. It wants to be relevant but not desperate. Edgy, but never sharp enough to cut the cashmere. There was a time it tried to court grime artists and sneaker culture, to recast itself in the light of cool. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it felt like your friend’s dad saying “vibe check.” But through all of it, the beige trench remained steadfast, unbothered, and unimpressed.

And perhaps that’s the key. No matter how many logo tees or graphic trainers the brand introduces, the private school peacocks will always return to the classics. Because to them, Burberry isn’t just a coat. It’s a cue. It’s the sartorial equivalent of a signet ring — both a family crest and a fashion statement. To wear it is to gesture, however subtly, that you come from a long line of people who wore it first.

At its best, Burberry allows for a certain kind of British costume play, one that doesn’t involve sequins or drama, but heritage and hush. A chance to blend in while still standing out. To be seen only by those who know where to look.

So when you see a young man by the river, coat belted and collar up, book in one hand, cigarette in the other… know that the Burberry isn’t accidental. It’s armour. It’s aspiration. It’s a whisper that says, “I may have been born in Clapham, but spiritually, I summer in Wiltshire.”

Nova Check and Nouveau Shame: When Burberry Got Too Popular

There’s a peculiar horror that flickers across the face of the British upper class when they realise something once exclusive has become widely adored. It’s the same look a duchess might wear upon discovering her gardener now drives the same car. Distress not at the car, but at the collapse of distinction. And in the early 2000s, Burberry’s Nova check, once a discreet lining for those in the know, suffered precisely that fate.

What began as tasteful tartan lining for trench coats and umbrellas found itself splashed across baseball caps, scarves, handbags, and worst of all… the high street. At first, it was just enthusiasm. Then came the knock-offs. And then came the panic. Suddenly, Burberry wasn’t whispering its heritage anymore; it was shouting it across nightclub queues in Romford. The nova check became a visual loudspeaker, and to the old guard, it was blaring all the wrong things.

The backlash wasn’t quiet. Newspapers clutched their pearls. Pundits declared the pattern “ruined.” Football WAGs wore it too boldly, and too often. Daniella Westbrook, wrapped in head-to-toe Burberry (even her baby) became the totem of upper-class despair. The message was clear: the wrong people were wearing it. Not because of aesthetic misstep, but because of social drift. The nova check had become democratised — and that was the real offence.

You’d think the guardians of heritage might respond with a thoughtful critique of late-stage capitalism. After all, it was capitalism and Burberry’s aggressive licensing that allowed the check to run riot in the first place. But no. The outrage wasn’t aimed at the system that sold the pattern to anyone with £40 and a desire to feel posh. It was aimed at the consumers. At the audacity of the public to desire pattern and prestige. The very thing the elite had built their allure on “recognisable luxury” had become recognisable in the wrong postcode.

What made it worse, of course, was that people looked good in it. Effortless in a way money couldn’t buy. There’s nothing quite so infuriating to the privileged than watching someone wear their visual codes without apology or invitation. The nova check had been stolen, in their eyes. And nothing makes the upper class cling tighter to “taste” than the fear of being mistaken for those without it.

It wasn’t the first time fashion flirted with social panic, but this was different. This wasn’t punk safety pins or Westwood corsets. This was heritage, hijacked. A century-old brand suddenly associated with “chav culture,” a term that thinly veiled Britain’s anxiety about class mobility. Burberry had gone from country estate to council estate in under five years. The response was swift and surgical. The brand pulled products. Scaled back licensing. Scrubbed the check from visibility like it had caught a contagious accent.

But what does it mean when heritage is knocked off? When a pattern woven with decades of tradition is printed onto polyester in a market stall? Some would argue it dilutes the brand. But others might suggest it reveals a deeper truth: that heritage, like taste, is only sacred until it’s shared. Once it crosses class boundaries, it’s no longer history. It’s fashion. And fashion, by nature, is promiscuous. It doesn’t care for lineage, only for attention.

In some ways, the nova check scandal was a case study in British discomfort with visibility. The elite prefer their symbols to be subtle. A flash of lining. A family crest embroidered in a colour only the right people recognise. Burberry’s sin, in their eyes, was not the pattern — but its volume. It became legible to everyone. And legibility, in a classist society, is dangerous. It blurs lines.

Of course, fashion is nothing if not cyclical. The nova check has crept back into favour, this time through the backdoor of irony and streetwear. Riccardo Tisci brought it to the runway with a wink. TikTok teens pair it with puffer jackets and platform boots. And somewhere, in a converted barn in Wiltshire, someone is still fuming about it.

But the truth is: once the nova check escaped its trench coat lining, it became something more democratic, more chaotic, and arguably more honest. It no longer belonged to officers or old money. It belonged to the crowd. And in that, it stopped being a lining and became a language.

And what is British fashion if not the constant negotiation between legacy and subversion, raincoats and rebellion?

Reclaiming the Rain: Burberry’s Modern Renaissance

At some point in the last two decades, Burberry looked into the mirror — full-length, bevelled, antique brass — and realised it didn’t quite recognise itself. The nova check, once demure, had shouted its way through too many soap operas and supermarket tabloids. The trench, once war-worn and weary, had become little more than a festival prop. Something had to be done.

Riccardo Tisci, with his Italian tailoring and gothic chic, like a dark angel airlifted from the Givenchy runway and dropped somewhere between Hackney and Belgravia. Under Tisci, Burberry grew moodier. The brand went nocturnal. Out with the countryside and corgis, in with sweatshirts and street casting. The nova check returned too. Not in a whisper this time, but with a kind of digitally-enhanced swagger. It wrapped itself around baseball caps and bomber jackets, flirting not with fox hunts, but with Hypebeast culture.

And for a while, this balancing act worked… just. Burberry became the teenager who borrows their granddad’s trench, slices off the sleeves, and wears it over a hoodie to a warehouse rave. It gestured at heritage while draped in the now. But the question lingered in the air like a whiff of rain on Regent Street: was this reinvention or identity crisis? Was Burberry actually changing, or just cosplaying modernity for the algorithm?

Then came Daniel Lee, the Yorkshire lad with a Bottega passport and a mission to scrub clean the slate, but not too clean. Under Lee, Burberry returned to something softer, greener, wetter. Campaigns now feel like postcards from a Britain that may or may not exist: mist-drenched moors, wet fringe on windblown models, boys in kilts staring into distance as if waiting for a bus that never comes. There’s an echo of the pastoral, but with edge. Heritage, yes — but not heritage as museum exhibit. More like heritage reimagined after a long cry and a cigarette behind the village hall.

The trench coat, of course, remains centre stage. But its meaning has shifted. Once armour against shrapnel and drizzle, it’s now something more poetic, and more performative. To wear one is to wear a reference, a quotation in gabardine. Some wear it with irony, like an inside joke about Britishness itself. Others wear it with reverence, as if the belt buckle holds together not just the waist, but a whole crumbling class system. Most float somewhere in between: nostalgic but not naive.

Because that’s what the trench has become, really — a wearable inheritance. Not in the literal sense, though it is that too, passed down from father to daughter, folded neatly in tissue, smelling faintly of mothballs and unresolved family dynamics. But also culturally. To wear a Burberry trench is to carry a narrative. Not just of fashion, but of empire, of class, of rain-soaked resilience. It’s costume and camouflage all at once.

Burberry knows this, of course. Its recent campaigns drip with symbolism: blue roses, white horses, Union Jacks reinterpreted in whisper tones. There’s an attempt to reclaim British mythology without stumbling into caricature. No bulldogs or bowler hats, thank God. Just enough familiarity to anchor it, just enough surrealism to unsettle. The irony now is elegant, subtle. A model in gumboots and gabardine, standing in a field like she’s late for a poetry reading. The Sloane Ranger aesthetic reimagined as something lonelier, less glossy, more emotionally available.

And maybe that’s where the modern renaissance lies. Not in scrubbing away the past, but in acknowledging its contradictions. Burberry can never be just a fashion brand. It’s too embroidered into the British psyche, too tangled in class performance, too soaked in the smell of wet tweed and unresolved aspiration. But it can be a prism, a way to refract that history into new forms. The trench coat isn’t just outerwear. It’s statement, satire, silhouette. It’s the national costume of a country that doesn’t know how to talk about itself unless it’s dressed for rain.

So, where does that leave us? Somewhere in between. Between irony and inheritance. Between mud and Mayfair. Between Thomas Burberry’s shepherd-born practicality and Daniel Lee’s romantic futurism. The coat remains the same — stormproof, cinched, quietly smug — but the wearer has changed.

Or maybe the rain has.

Fashion as Flag: Wearing Empire in the Age of Post-Colonial Reckoning

There’s a peculiar silence stitched into the seams of a trench coat. Not the romantic silence of rainy London walks or lovers parting on station platforms, but something heavier. The hush of military orders. The absence left by conscripted bodies. The quiet, tidy, very British kind of violence that doesn’t announce itself — just buttons up, belts in, and carries on.

It’s easy to forget, in the soft lighting of a Bond Street boutique, that the trench coat was built not for style, but for strategy. Gabardine was developed for soldiers, not socialites. Those storm flaps weren’t for flair, they were for gas masks and grenades. The epaulettes once held rank, not runway appeal. To wear a trench is to wear empire, quite literally, a design born to shelter officers as they surveyed distant lands and drew imaginary lines across maps they didn’t grow up with. The coat has always travelled across trenches, colonies, and eventually, catwalks.

But what happens when the children of empire grow up? When the aesthetic survives but the ideology curdles? We live, after all, in the age of post-colonial reckoning. Statues come down. Streets are renamed. Syllabuses rewritten. And yet, the trench coat remains — not hidden, not apologetic, but proudly hung in wardrobe after wardrobe. An icon. A staple. A classic.

Perhaps too classic.

Wearing Burberry today is not a political act, at least not intentionally. For most, it’s about silhouette, not sovereignty. The drape, the structure, the way it makes a person look like they’ve got somewhere important to be, that’s the appeal. But intention and impact rarely sit at the same table, especially in fashion. The trench carries with it a visual grammar of order, discipline, and control, the very pillars of the imperial project. It is, in many ways, the uniform of quiet domination. Even stripped of insignia, it still knows how to command a room.

There’s a moment — walking into a lobby, stepping out of a car, entering a gallery — when the trench does what it was designed to do. It asserts. It protects. It separates. You feel the gaze shift slightly. The cut is flattering, yes, but it also flirts with authority. The trench doesn’t ask for attention. It assumes it’s already been granted.

And yet, can we blame the coat for its context? Must fabric account for history? Is every garment guilty by association? These are not easy questions, but fashion is not an innocent medium. It remembers things. Even when we don’t.

There is a certain seductive amnesia at play, a stylish forgetting. The same way chinoiserie wallpaper was once a flex of conquest, or how safari jackets became “resortwear.” The trench coat was absorbed into the modern wardrobe not as an admission, but as an aesthetic. War, rewritten as weatherproofing. Command, rebranded as cool.

And perhaps that’s where the discomfort truly lies — not in the origin, but in the ease of its erasure. The empire fades, but its wardrobe remains. Pressed. Dry-cleaned. On sale.

There’s something unsettling about this soft continuity. The way the past lingers, not as memory, but as design detail. A cuff. A buckle. A certain shade of khaki. Colonial residue masquerading as neutral.

But there is also power in recontextualisation. To wear a trench today as a brown woman, or a queer man, or anyone who might not have been issued one in 1916, that, too, is a kind of reclamation. You wear it differently. You wear it knowingly. You wear it not as tribute, but as transformation. And perhaps that is how empires are unstitched: not by disavowal, but by redress.

Fashion has always had a complicated relationship with power. It flatters it. It mocks it. It borrows its shoulder pads. Burberry, with its origins in battlefield utility and its afterlife in luxury, embodies that tension perfectly. It is at once armour and accessory. A flag and a cloak. A garment that once marched, and now poses.

So is wearing Burberry a tribute? A critique? Or simply a stylish form of forgetting?

Maybe all three.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the most British thing of all is to wrap yourself in empire and call it weather-appropriate.

The Weight of Inherited Fabric

I remember standing in a department store as a child, drowning in a trench coat far too big for me. I’d pulled it off the rack with the kind of reverence normally reserved for relics. Beige, belted, and smelling faintly of cardboard and aftershave. I rolled the sleeves, struck a pose in the mirror, and tried to look important — the way grown-ups did in films, or at funerals.

It didn’t fit. Of course it didn’t. But I wanted it to. I wanted the shoulder pads, the storm flap, the secret sense of knowing where I was going. It felt like stepping into a story: one I didn’t fully understand, but wanted desperately to be part of.

That’s the thing about heritage: it seduces. Even when stitched with contradictions, even when ghosted by empire and class and all the things we say we’re done with. There’s something about the way Burberry wraps around the body that makes you feel like you’re inheriting more than fabric. Like you’re borrowing significance.

Maybe that’s what clothes do best, blur the line between who we are and who we’re trying to become. A trench coat is just cotton and buttons. Until it isn’t. Until it becomes armour. Or aspiration. Or a memory of trying to matter in a mirror.

And somehow, Burberry still knows how to make that moment feel sacred. Everytime the belt cinches, history holds its breath. 

S xoxo

Written in Monaco

20th March 2025