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

There exists a specific scent woven into the fibres of a Burberry trench coat — a mingling of faint rain, aged cedar, and the quiet, inescapable weight of inherited expectation. Its fabric possesses the substantial, immovable quality of a legacy that refuses to crease. 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.

By the time the twentieth century had fully unveiled its brutalities, Burberry had long transcended its original purpose as mere protection from a London drizzle. It was standard issue in the sodden trenches of the Somme, insulation against the polar winds on Antarctic expeditions, and a fixture on the frames of monarchs and adventurers. Eventually, it became the customary garb for private school adolescents, worn between sporting fixtures and bouts of cultivated existential unease.

Somewhere along the path from the mud of No Man’s Land to the polished pavements of Knightsbridge, the brand’s essence underwent a subtle but complete alchemy. It ceased to be solely about enduring the weather and became instead about weathering other things entirely: the demands of class, the pressure of scrutiny, the vulgarity of its own commercial success. What is the meaning when an object engineered for the chaos of warfare is meticulously repurposed as a cipher for quiet wealth? When pure utility is systematically rebranded as the pinnacle of elegance? When a garment born from working-class ingenuity ends up defining the uniform of a class for whom work is a theoretical concept?

This is a narrative of calculated metamorphosis. About how hardy fabric is woven into national myth, how inconvenient history is sent out for professional dry-cleaning, and how one particular coat marched resolutely through class conflict and global upheaval only to find itself, a century later, draped over the forearm of a man named Hugo. Hugo, who claims vaguely to be “in finance,” but whose actual profession involves the studied perusal of The Spectator and the maintenance of three exceedingly well-bred Labradors.

Ultimately, Burberry is more than a trench coat. It is a perfectly tailored, beige-coloured question.

Stormproof and Socially Mobile: Thomas Burberry’s Humble Beginnings

Long before it became a synonym for British luxury, before it was folded into Mayfair wardrobes and wrapped for Sloane Square Christmases, the house of Burberry began as a problem-solving enterprise in the provincial damp of Basingstoke. The man behind the label, Thomas Burberry, hailed from a social stratum that would have been distinctly unimpressed by the future occupants of his coats. He was the son of a nonconformist shepherd and a grocer, born into a world of frugal ambition and relentless weather, where endurance was prized over any concept of elegance. One can still detect the stubborn residue of that Basingstoke mud on the hem.

There exists a certain historical irony in this trajectory. A boy from Hampshire sets out to keep working men dry and ends up, generations later, clothing the sons of bankers, baronets, and backbench Tories. Not bad for someone whose childhood presumably lacked foxhunting weekends and silver-plated hip flasks.

Burberry founded his first outfitter’s shop in 1856, driven less by a vision of sartorial dominance than by a practical, almost Protestant, curiosity. His focus was the literal British climate — the rain, the wind, the pervasive damp — not the metaphorical storms of fashion or reputation. He pursued function, his goal was to keep people dry, mobile, and free from pneumonia on their way to post a letter. His was a philosophy of utility: solve a tangible problem, execute it well, and then proceed with one's business.

Then came gabardine.

Gabardine traded entirely in utility, forgoing sparkle and seduction for pure function. This tightly woven, breathable, and impermeable fabric embodied a distinct textile morality, as though its inventor considered suffering the weather a pointless exercise in stoicism. It was practical, resilient, and executed a quiet revolution.

With this invention, Burberry embarked on a characteristically English form of social ascent — one achieved not through champagne and connections, but through slow, meticulous stitching, as if the gabardine itself had woven its way into his ambition. The coat designed for farmers and country doctors became the essential uniform for explorers, officers, and anyone confronting the extremes of nature. Shackleton wore it. Scott of the Antarctic wore it. The soldiers in the trenches of the First World War wore it, trudging through mud wrapped in Burberry’s practical genius.

The trench coat was 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 unglamorous, essential, and in its pure utility, somehow devastatingly stylish — though I suspect no one would have dared say so aloud at the time. There is a peculiar faith to be found in facing annihilation while wearing a perfectly considered coat.

And survive it did. Though the coat, like the country, evolved. Once the war was over, the trench coat did not retreat into military surplus bins. It slouched, instead, onto civvy street. It reappeared in film noir and the corridors of power, gradually repurposed from field gear into a symbol of aspiration. By the 1950s, its transformation was underway, migrating from functional relic to fashion staple. And while Thomas Burberry himself did not live to witness this social repackaging in its entirety, one must wonder what the grocer’s son from Basingstoke would have made of aristocrats and debutantes adopting his coat with the effortless assurance of those who have never glanced at a price tag.

There is a peculiar poetry in this arc. A man who designed for endurance inadvertently designed for elegance. An innovation born of sheer practicality was systematically rebranded as prestige. Survival was polished into swagger. The humble raincoat became a heritage artefact. What once kept the working man dry evolved into the ultimate shorthand for a specific, costly Britishness that is reserved, understated, and deceptively expensive.

Perhaps this constitutes the lasting alchemy of the Burberry story. It never raises its voice, speaking only in a cultivated murmur. And within that murmur resides a complete legacy: conceived in a Basingstoke shop, draped on shoulders royal and ordinary, shielding all from a climate — meteorological and social — that remains caught in a perpetual, pending downpour.

Trench Warfare and Trench Chic: From Soldiers to Socialites

Somewhere between the mud of the Somme and the velvet rope at Annabel’s, the trench coat lost its gun but kept its gravity. It is a peculiar alchemy, watching a garment march from the theatre of war to the theatre of brunch, still carrying the echoes of war but now paired with suede loafers and a decaf oat latte. Once the standard issue for survival, it now billows behind men whose greatest daily threat is a delayed Uber Eats delivery.

But it began, of course, with war. Forged in the grim, soul-annihilating reality of trench warfare, the coat was a product of pure necessity, utterly indifferent to aesthetics. Its design priorities were brutally simple: keep the officer dry, allow for the insignia of rank, and accommodate the tools of engagement. Epaulettes, D-rings, storm flaps, and a cinching belt constituted a form of soft armour, a wearable bunker.

And yet, war, for all its horror, has always had a strange relationship with fashion. What begins as brutal utility of war frequently begets, years later, the currency of cool. Camouflage trousers. Bomber jackets. Military jackets. The trench coat. Somewhere along the line, the blood is laundered out, replaced by a sanitised symbolism of prestige, edge, or rugged individualism. The horror is softened by nostalgia, and the garment becomes aesthetic property. The trench coat, in particular, carries the ghost of a specific, stoic dignity — a sartorial suggestion that the wearer possesses a latent, untested capacity to withstand a storm.

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 purposeful swing of its silhouette. Maybe it was the unspoken gravitas of its military pedigree. Or maybe, deep down, a characteristically British appetite for narratives where mere survival is polished into a form of sophistication.

What is truly fascinating is the way the trench coat refused to be anchored by its genesis. It was deployed over pinstripe suits in the City, or thrown over a mini-dress and knickers in the libertine haze of 1960s Soho. From the world-weary detective in film noir to the androgynous figure of the New Romantic, the trench coat murmured a different intention with each decade, its authority always implied, never declared. It became the uniform for those who understood power as something best suggested by a whisper.

And then, slowly, it commenced its calculated ascent up the social gradient. It found its way onto the shoulders of established wealth, arriviste capital, and those desperately performing either. The same fabric that once bore the grime of the front line now carries the expensive, citrus-woody scent of Creed Aventus. It is as likely to be seen on a front-row editor as on a damp Labrador, equally at home tucked into a Range Rover or trailing behind a student outside a Cambridge college. Through some improbable sartorial sleight of hand, it became an object of desire.

There exists a specific breed of man, invariably encountered in the rarefied postcodes of London, who wears his trench coat like a hereditary title he affects to disdain but secretly cherishes. He will offer a perfunctory grumble about ‘practicality’ and ‘this bloody weather,’ all the while knowing the precisely angled collar frames a face that suggests he could quote Churchill while specifying the vermouth in his martini. It is a masterful performance of inherited toughness, a bluff backed by generations of social capital.

The trench coat is, therefore, a study in contradiction. It is at once rugged and refined, heavy with the gravitas of conflict yet light with the affectation of elegance. It acknowledges hardship while being priced exclusively for comfort. It is an artefact with a formidable CV, listing both military commendations and receipts from luxury department stores.

Its enduring appeal, perhaps, stems from this very duality. It bridges a peculiarly British set of obsessions: a stoic reverence for bad weather, a romanticisation of emotional restraint, the cultivated art of appearing both aloof and compelling. The trench coat does more than repel rain; it confers a certain dignity. It allows one to navigate a downpour with a glide, not a scurry. It implies preparedness without panic, confidence without the vulgarity of display.

In the end, is this not the ultimate function of class signalling? The trench coat quietly asserts, “I have endured,” leaving the nature of that endurance — be it the Battle of Ypres or a tedious wait for a table at The Wolseley — deliciously ambiguous. The garment carries the narrative, absolving the wearer of the need to possess one. One simply fastens the belt and steps into the drizzle, adopting the demeanour of someone who has survived far worse, and managed to remain impeccably turned out throughout the ordeal.

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

Burberry refrains from shouting. It communicates instead through the low, rounded vowels of a certain upbringing, in the quiet dialect of well-tarnished silver, damp retrievers, and holidays taken in a house that is never rented. It is conspicuously unflashy, performing its expense in a whisper. It dresses the wearer as someone whose importance is so assured it requires no explanation, having been settled generations ago by a portrait hanging in a seldom-used room.

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 is not an absence of colour but a heritable condition. The coat draped itself around Etonian frames and the poised shoulders of Chelsea matriarchs with immaculate hair and vacant afternoons. Somewhere along the line, it ceased to be about enduring the climate and became instead a cipher for a specific postal code.

It is difficult to pinpoint what, precisely, made Burberry the house mascot for old money affectation. Is it the stone-washed palette, evocative of a country house’s draughty corridor? The cinched waist that alludes to a cavalry officer’s silhouette without the associated mud and manure? The subtle suggestion that one is perpetually ready to pivot from a board meeting to a grouse moor? Or has the fabric simply absorbed, through prolonged contact, the ancestral authority of the baronets and backbench MPs who have worn it?

The central irony is that Burberry was never intended for this clientele. 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 banking or 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. The boys, still pink-cheeked from rugby or Latin, depending on the hour, wear their trenches with a deliberately careless openness, revealing a navy jumper and an expression of cultivated bemusement. The effort is to appear utterly uncontrived, as if one’s elegance were a happy accident encountered while perusing a first edition.

The trench coat in these circles becomes less about weather resistance and more about mood. It is 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 are 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? The early 2000s, with their proliferation of branded baseball caps and the scandalous democratisation of the nova check, saw Burberry briefly rebranded as a symbol of rebellious chic. The pattern that once whispered discreetly of heritage began to scream from council estates, appalling the traditionalist and electrifying a new, streetwise audience. For a moment, Burberry’s scent was less rain on tweed and more the tang of cheap lager and Lynx Africa.

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 a vicar attempting street slang. But through all of it, the beige trench remained steadfast, unbothered, and unimpressed.

This, perhaps, is the foundation of its enduring power. Regardless of seasonal collections featuring logo-emblazoned t-shirts or collaboration trainers, the private school peacock will invariably return to the classic trench. For this cohort, Burberry is a social cue. It operates as the sartorial equivalent of a signet ring — simultaneously a family crest and a fashion accessory. To wear it is to signal, however subtly, membership in a lineage that adopted it first.

At its most effective, Burberry facilitates a specific form of British costume drama. One devoid of sequins, but rich in heritage and hushed implication. It is the art of blending in while still being legible to the initiated, of being seen only by those equipped to decode the signs.

Therefore, when you observe a young man by the river, his coat precisely belted, collar turned against an imaginary wind, a paperback in one hand and a cigarette in the other, understand this: the Burberry is no accident. It is social armour. It is distilled aspiration. It is a whisper that says, quite plainly, “I may reside in Clapham, but in spirit, I am forever taking a long weekend in Wiltshire.”

Nova Check and Nouveau Shame: When Burberry Got Too Popular

A specific, almost surgical horror grips the British establishment when a once-exclusive symbol finds mass appeal. It is the look of a duke realising his gamekeeper now wears the same brand of wellington boots — a distress directed not at the object itself, but at the catastrophic erosion of social distinction. In the early 2000s, Burberry’s Nova check, originally conceived as a discreet sartorial footnote for the initiated, met precisely this fate.

What began as a restrained tartan lining for trench coats and umbrella canopies was suddenly emblazoned across baseball caps, scarves, and handbags, before descending irrevocably onto the high street. Enthusiasm quickly spiralled into rampant counterfeiting, and finally, into a state of collective panic. The pattern that once whispered discreetly of legacy was now shouting across nightclub queues in Romford. To the traditionalist, the Nova check had become a garish loudhailer broadcasting all the wrong social frequencies.

The ensuing backlash was a spectacle of performative distress. Newspapers clutched their pearls. Pundits declared the pattern “ruined.” Football WAGs wore it too boldly, and too often. Danniella Westbrook, wrapped in head-to-toe Burberry (even her baby) became the totem of upper-class despair. The core grievance was transparent: the wrong people were wearing it. The offence was social. The Nova check had been democratised, and its exclusivity fatally compromised.

One might have expected a thoughtful critique of the aggressive licensing and late-capitalist logic that propelled the pattern into ubiquity. After all, it was capitalism and Burberry’s aggressive licensing that allowed the check to run riot in the first place. Instead, the outrage was conveniently redirected onto the consumers themselves, not at the system that sold the pattern to anyone with £40 and a desire to feel posh. The audacity of the aspiring public to covet a symbol of prestige was framed as the transgression, not the corporate strategy that sold it to them. The very mechanism of “recognisable luxury” upon which elite allure depended had become recognisable in the wrong postal districts, rendering the code obsolete.

A further insult was the effortless style with which this new demographic wore the pattern. There is nothing more unnerving to the privileged than witnessing their visual vocabulary appropriated with unapologetic confidence. In their view, the Nova check had been stolen. This perceived cultural theft triggered a fierce retreat into the bastion of “taste,” a last-ditch effort to preserve a boundary threatened by mere visibility.

While fashion has always flirted with social panic, this episode cut deeper. This was not the deliberate subversion of punk or the intellectual provocation of avant-garde design. This was heritage, seemingly hijacked. The century-old brand became entangled with the pejorative concept of “chav culture,” a term thinly disguising a profound anxiety about unwanted class mobility. Burberry’s perceived journey from country estate to council estate prompted a swift and severe corporate retrenchment. Products were pulled, licensing was drastically scaled back, and the check was scrubbed from prominence as if it were a contagious social disease.

This raises a more fundamental question: what truly occurs when heritage is replicated? When a pattern woven with decades of tradition is screen-printed onto market-stall polyester, does it dilute the brand, or does it expose a more uncomfortable truth? It suggests that heritage, much like taste, only maintains its sacred status while it remains confined. The moment it crosses class boundaries, it is demoted from history to mere fashion — a promiscuous force indifferent to lineage and concerned only with attention.

In some ways, the Nova check scandal functioned as a masterclass in the British elite’s profound discomfort with overt 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 was one of volume. The pattern became universally legible, and in a rigidly hierarchical society, such legibility is inherently dangerous. It blurs meticulously maintained lines.

Naturally, fashion operates on a cyclical logic. The Nova check has been cautiously rehabilitated, reintroduced through the Trojan horse of irony and high-street collaboration. Designers like Riccardo Tisci have redeployed it; TikTok aesthetics pair it with chunky soles. Somewhere, in a converted barn in the Cotswolds, a purist likely still seethes.

The enduring truth, however, is this: once the Nova check escaped the lining of the trench coat, it was liberated. It became something more democratic, more chaotic, and infinitely more interesting. It ceased to be the sole property of officers and old money and entered the lexicon of the crowd. In doing so, it transformed from a discreet lining into a fully formed, and fiercely contested, language.

And what, after all, is the story of British fashion if not this endless, fraught negotiation between legacy and insurgency, between the raincoat and the rebellion it inadvertently spawned?

Reclaiming the Rain: Burberry’s Modern Renaissance

At a certain juncture in the last twenty years, Burberry must have confronted its own reflection — in a full-length, gilded, undeniably antique mirror — and experienced a moment of profound self-estrangement. The Nova check, once a mark of discreet lineage, had been bellowed across tabloid front pages. The trench coat, once heavy with the gravity of history, risked being reduced to a fancy-dress accessory. A correction was clearly required.

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 his direction, Burberry grew moodier. The brand went nocturnal. Out with the countryside and corgis, in with sweatshirts and street casting. The Nova check returned too with a kind of digitally-amplified bravado, emblazoned across baseball caps and bomber jackets in an overt courtship of Hypebeast culture.

And for a while, this precarious balancing act held. Burberry became akin to an heir who raids the ancestral wardrobe, cutting the sleeves from a heritage trench and pairing it with a hoodie for a night in a railway arch.It performed a pantomime of its own history while dressed for the present moment. 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, tasked with a careful restoration. Under Lee, Burberry returned to something softer, greener, wetter. Campaigns now evoke a distinctly mythic, mist-shrouded Britain — all windswept moors and melancholic youth staring into middle distance. This is a pastoral vision, but one laced with a contemporary unease. The heritage on offer is something revisited after an emotional crisis and a stiff drink.

The trench coat, inevitably, remains the central protagonist. Yet its significance has been subtly rewritten. Once armour against shrapnel and showers, it has evolved into a more poetic, inherently performative object. To wear one now is to don a quotation, a ready-made narrative in gabardine. Some adopt it with irony, treating it as a wry commentary on Britishness itself. Others approach it with reverence, as if its belt buckle somehow cinches together an entire fraying social order. Most occupy an ambivalent middle ground, nostalgic yet knowingly complicit.

The trench has effectively become a form of wearable inheritance. This operates both literally, as a garment passed down through generations smelling of cedar and familial silence, and culturally. To wear a Burberry trench is to shoulder a specific narrative — one woven from threads of empire, class, and stoic, rain-soaked endurance. It functions simultaneously as costume and camouflage.

Burberry knows this, of course. Its recent imagery is saturated with curated emblems: bruised blue roses, spectral white horses, Union Jacks rendered in faded pastels. This represents an attempt to reclaim national iconography without descending into pastiche. There are no bulldogs or beefeaters here, only a carefully measured blend of the familiar and the faintly surreal. The irony is now refined, almost wistful. A model stands in a field in gumboots and gabardine, looking like she’s awaiting inspiration rather than a bus. It is the Sloane Ranger aesthetic reimagined as something more introspective, less assured, and strangely vulnerable.

Perhaps this is the locus of its modern renaissance: through a deliberate engagement with its inherent contradictions. Burberry can never be merely a fashion label; it is too deeply embroidered into the fabric of British class performance and national self-image, too permeated by the scent of damp wool and quiet aspiration. Its purpose now is to act as a prism, refracting that complex history into new, ambiguous forms. The trench coat is a statement, a satire, a silhouette. The unofficial national costume for a nation that finds direct conversation impossible unless suitably dressed for precipitation.

So where does this leave us? In a state of productive ambivalence. Somewhere between irony and legacy, between the mud of its origins and the gloss of Mayfair, between Thomas Burberry’s shepherd-born pragmatism and Daniel Lee’s lyrical futurism. The coat itself remains unchanged — stormproof, cinched, and quietly assured. The wearer, however, and the cultural climate they inhabit, have been utterly transformed.

Or perhaps it is simply that the nature of the rain has changed.

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

A distinct silence is woven into the very 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 expresses itself through impeccable tailoring and a stiff upper lip, rather than through clamour.

It is dangerously easy, within the hushed, caramel-lit interiors of a Bond Street boutique, to overlook the coat’s true provenance. Its engineering prioritised tactical utility over any aesthetic consideration. Gabardine was a textile innovation for the battlefield, not the boulevard. Storm flaps were designed to deflect poison gas, not drizzle; epaulettes bore military rank, not the ambitions of a stylist. To don the trench is to literally wear the architecture of empire — a garment conceived to shelter officers as they imposed order on foreign landscapes. It has always been a travelling garment, moving from the trenches of Europe to the colonies and, ultimately, to the cosmopolitan catwalk.

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. Yet the trench coat endures, suspended in a state of graceful amnesia within countless wardrobes. An icon. A staple. A classic. Perhaps too classic for its own complicated good.

For the contemporary wearer, selecting Burberry is seldom a conscious political gesture. The appeal is rooted in silhouette and structure, in the garment’s unique ability to confer an air of purposeful importance. However, in the realm of fashion, intention and historical resonance rarely align. The trench coat’s visual grammar — its order, its discipline, its inherent command of space — remains inextricably linked to the logic of imperial control. Stripped of its regimental insignia, it retains the posture of quiet domination.

There exists a specific moment, upon entering a lobby or alighting from a car, when the coat performs its original function. It asserts. It demarcates. It separates the wearer from the crowd. The admiring glance it receives is for its cut, certainly, but also for its unspoken flirtation with inherited authority. The trench operates on the assumption of its own legitimacy.

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 as an aesthetic. War, rewritten as weatherproofing. Command, rebranded as cool. And perhaps that is 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 is 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 a neutral classic.

Yet there exists a potent counter-narrative in the act of conscious recontextualisation. For a woman of colour, a queer individual, or anyone whose ancestors would have been excluded from its original issuance, wearing the trench becomes a complex reclamation. It is worn differently, knowingly as transformation. This, perhaps, is one method of unpicking empire: not through outright disavowal, but through deliberate and subversive redress.

Fashion’s relationship with power has always been fraught, a dance of flattery and mockery. Burberry, suspended between its genesis in battlefield utility and its afterlife in rarefied luxury, embodies this tension perfectly. It is both armour and accessory, a flag and a cloak, a garment that once marched in formation and now strikes a pose for the camera.

So, is the act of wearing Burberry today a tribute, a critique, or merely an elegant form of forgetting? The answer is likely all three, simultaneously. This ambiguity may, in fact, be the entire point. There is a grim, perfect irony in it — that the most British act of all might be to wrap oneself in the spectral fabric of empire and call it nothing more than a sensible choice for a drizzly day.

The Weight of Inherited Fabric

I recall standing in the hushed, carpeted cavern of a department store as a child, utterly submerged in a trench coat several sizes too large. I had lifted it from the rack with the solemn care one might afford a religious vestment. It was beige, belted, and carried a scent of new cardboard and borrowed, paternal cologne. I meticulously rolled the sleeves, attempted a stance before the mirror, and endeavoured to project an air of consequence — the kind worn by adults in serious films or at formal, sombre occasions.

The fit was, predictably, a comical failure. The shoulders slumped, the hem pooled around my ankles. Yet the desire remained intact. I coveted the authoritative shoulder line, the purposeful storm flap, the unspoken certainty of direction it promised. It felt less like trying on a coat and more like auditioning for a role in a grand, opaque narrative. A story whose nuances I could not grasp, but whose leading part I ached to play.

This is the potent allure of heritage: its capacity to seduce. Even when its seams are straining with historical contradiction, even when haunted by the ghosts of empire and the rigid architecture of class, its appeal persists. There is something in the specific drape of a Burberry trench, in the way it encloses the body, that suggests you are assuming more than mere cloth. It feels like leasing a piece of borrowed significance.

Perhaps this is the fundamental magic of clothing: its power to obscure the boundary between our present self and our aspirational shadow. A trench coat is, in blunt material terms, cleverly treated cotton and functional fastenings. Then, through some cultural alchemy, it transcends. It becomes psychological armour. It crystallises aspiration. It solidifies into the memory of a child in a reflective surface, desperately practicing how to look like they matter.

Remarkably, Burberry has retained a masterful command over this transformative ritual. With every precise cinch of the belt, it feels as though history itself pauses, just for a second, to acknowledge the transaction.

S xoxo

Written in Monaco

20th March 2025