210217 – Burberry – London

Burberry a PLC since 2002, has been on a remarketing and growth trend for the last decade. The brand had suffered as counterfeits flooded the market and its signature check became synonymous with the wide boy and football hooligan. In 2006 Angela Ahrendts was appointed as CEO and in 2009 Christopher Bailey became Chief Creative Officer, together they focused on losing the hooligan association, instigating online sales and diversifying the product range. To implement this, emphasis on the signature check brand was reduced to less than 10% of its product range. Simultaneously legal actions were enforced against the counterfeiters protecting Burberrys IP. In 2006 a Spanish franchise was bought out and the group began online market expansion. The next seven years saw sales increase threefold helped greatly by increased revenues from the Asian markets. Angela Ahrendts left to join Apple in 2013 and in 2014 Christopher Bailey took the joint role of CEO and CCO.

Fashion in a commercial machine like this is not an art, its about professional packaging and its difficult not to be cynical when a large corporate tries so hard to tick all the right boxes. With its social media presence created through the support of up and coming musicians and its art referencing that is really art backdrop. Commercial packaging is about associative context and through this associative context one directs. Fashion buyers are a fickle crowd and have no concerns for deeper conceptual meaning and fashion is not the medium for this. A large corporate PLC is judged by the measure that all PLCs are judged, growth and profit and on this Burberry has been a national success story. 

Post war art was left traumatized; it saw the wars as a sad scientific conclusion to the Enlightenment, where technology tears mankind apart. Arts reaction was to return to the primitive, with African, Polynesian and Inca art being the inspiration. The dreamscapes of Freud and the Surrealists fueled a sensual escapist art devoid of the holocaust of the recent social/political context. The late works of Matisse, Corbusier, Picasso, Hepworth and Moore all fall within the category of the primitive sensual. As Henry Moore left Hampstead for Hertfordshire, the solitude and peace of the English landscape would be a needed counterpoint to the gas poisoning he endured during WW1. A war in which he entered searching for the inner righteous hero and left only to despise Khaki and all it stood for.

The Henry Moore works alongside the Burberry SS17 collection at the Makers House offer sensual reprieve. The Burberry made-to-order capes inspired by the works of Moore need a further filter to elude to the Freudian dreamscapes. Luckily this filter was provided via a phantom silhouette that turned the capes into soft Rorschach images suitable for interpretations, where the dream cape ventures into the world of the dreamscape.

For Rorschach see text 250216.

Images left to right. 1 Henry Moore detail. 2-7 Burberry, Capes through a screen.

The Surrogate Twin