Last season it was all midsummer fields and festival mud and that very pastoral idea of Britain. This season? Daniel Lee yanked Burberry straight into midwinter, after-dark London. Cold air. Glossy streets. The kind of night where everything feels a little sharper. The brand that’s been defined forever by the grid of its Nova check is now sketching something much more direct, much more graphic—not just in clothes, but in how it stages itself.
Tonight’s show was slick. Like, literally slick. Latex “puddles” shimmered on the runway, and by the finale, the lights on a scaffolded version of Tower Bridge were pulsing so dramatically they made the real thing—right there across the river from Burberry’s Old Billingsgate—look almost shy. Backstage, Lee got reflective. He talked about arriving in London as a student, living in Whitechapel, feeling homesick, and walking along the Thames to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London just to feel grounded again. “I was excited just to be here,” he said. Which feels… very real. Very London.

There is, generally speaking, zero appetite for ultra-formal evening wear at London Fashion Week. Like… none. Except—always, reliably—for Richard Quinn. Every season, without fail, he sends out these glittering, almost defiant processions of ballgowns, and every season it feels like him calmly saying: this is what I do. No pivot. No irony. No apology. “We always look at our business as making beautiful gowns for women at these amazing events of their life,” he said backstage. Weddings. Big occasions. Someone else’s once-in-a-lifetime night. That’s the brief. Period.