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“It’s been a while now, yeah: three years. So versus everyone else, it’s one of the longest!” Daniel Lee laughs down the Zoom from the studio in Burberry’s Westminster headquarters from which he has creatively led Britain’s prime luxury fashion house since October 2022. It has taken Lee a while to find his stride, but now that he has, Burberry is on the up.
At Lee’s first show, in February 2023, he peppered his runway with band T-shirts, hot-water bottles, duck-bill hats and many more ephemeral gestures so quirky they sometimes felt borderline arbitrary. He honored the house he had just joined with plenty of checks across the collection, and referenced its canonical trench coat in about 20% of the looks. However, entirely understandably, Lee’s formula felt adapted from that with which he had found so much success—and four British Fashion Awards in one year alone—during his time at Bottega Veneta between 2018 and 2021.
If Lee’s earliest Burberry collections didn’t exactly make it rain at the house’s global network of 400-ish stores, that was in line with a broader malaise across the luxury fashion world. Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, however, Burberry embarked upon a process of constructive adaptation: it brought in new management in the form of seasoned American CEO Joshua Schulman, who devised a new strategy entitled Burberry Forward. While Schulman decreed wholesale changes under the bonnet of Burberry’s structural engine, plus a newly tight focus upon the house’s core heritage and identity, he kept faith with Lee. This meant that in 2025, when no fewer than 15 creative directors showed debut collections across the apex strata of fashion, Lee and Burberry were insulated from the drama.
Lee’s time at Burberry is now longer than he served at Bottega. That depth of relationship is bearing fruit commercially and creatively. Following Schulman’s rubric, his most recent collection, fall 2026, hewed much closer to Burberry’s core codes of internationally recognizable Britishness (Tower Bridge, partying, and puddles) as well as to the trench: around 60% of the looks in the collection contained a trench in some form. Yet despite that apparent simplification, the trenches themselves were in line with Lee’s exuberantly experimental creative urges; playful, ingenious, complex, and witty.
As the weather brightens for both Burberry and Lee, the house has entered the 170th anniversary of its foundation by Thomas Burberry back in 1856. To mark the anniversary, Lee commissioned a campaign saturated with icons. Shot by Tim Walker it features 24 British and international luminaries drawn from the worlds of fashion, entertainment, and sport. All of them, naturally, are wearing Burberry’s famous trench coat. Vogue Runway connected with Lee shortly before his most recent show: below is an edited version of the conversation.
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