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RUNWAY REALITY
From far left : Kim
Kardashian and Kanye
West, Beyoncé and
Adele, all in Givenchy
designs by Tisci;
M.I.A. and Madonna in
Burberry; four runway
looks from Givenchy;
two runway looks from
Burberry by Tisci.openly transgender Lea T—a former assistant of
Tisci’s—became a featured model, creating waves
of headlines and even being interviewed by Oprah.
Tisci surrounded himself with artists such as
Marina Abramovic, and his casting embraced black
and Latino models; rappers and royalty were dressed
and treated with equal respect. In 2011, Tisci outfi t-
ted Jay-Z and Kanye West for their Watch the Throne
tour, including a black leather kilt for West, which
proved West’s and the house’s daring fashion cre-
dentials. All of which seems commonplace now.
Then? Not so much.
Around that time, I visited Tisci in Givenchy’s
gilded, echoing haute couture salons in Paris’s 8th
arrondissement. He was 35 years old and seen as
something of an upstart, despite having been the
house’s creative director for fi ve years. “I really am
the person I am today because of my family,” he told
me then, in an interview for Arena Homme+, explain-
ing that he was the youngest in his family, with eight
older sisters. Their father died when Tisci was 4.
“We went through so many hard times together, not
having money,” he said, tearing up. “My mother...is
like Gandhi for me. She does not read or write prop-
erly but she is the most amazing woman I have met
in my entire life.... She taught us all how to behave,
to respect education, to learn from religion.... She
taught us that we could come from nothing to be
something and not step on anybody along the way.
I never felt diff erent or lesser or strange because we
were poor and from the south of Italy and yet living
in the north.... It was really tough.” (He grew up in
Como, near Milan.) He said, “But it did not f— me up!”
Tisci is still something of an outsider, attuned to
the feelings and needs of other outsiders. Now, in a
diff erent country, at a diff erent fashion house, with a
huge task on his hands, he is reassuringly the same.
Every day, fi rst thing in the morning, before leav-
ing his Mayfair home for the gym, he FaceTimes his
90-year-old mother. Yet his raw emotion has been
tempered somewhat by steeliness; the privileged
and protected playground of Givenchy has been sup-
planted by the public scrutiny of Burberry, which
trades on the London Stock Exchange. Romance
fi rmly holds hands with fi nance. He says, “Before I
was only a creative person; now I have to think about
business, about legal, about many things.”
E
RIC HOBSBAWM, the late Marxist his-
torian, said in his 1994 book, Age of
Extremes: “Why brilliant fashion-
designers, a notoriously non-analytic
breed, sometimes succeed in antici-
pating the shape of things to come
better than professional predictors, is one of the
most obscure questions in history; and, for the histo-
rian of culture, one of the most central.”
Ignoring the boundaries and limitations of race,
gender, sexuality and class has always been a given
for Tisci. “We have to move on from that,” he says.
“It is great, what has been achieved. But now we have
to look at other, wider social problems to do with
nature: recycling, the animal world. What are we
going to do for the future? Not for us, but for future
generations—the children of my sisters.”
He adds: “People say I was the king of the mil-
lennials. Millennials, millennials, that’s all I would
hear. But you cannot forget the rest.” At Burberry,
Tisci has not forgotten them.
Neither has Marco Gobbetti, who has been
Burberry’s CEO since 2017, when he succeeded
Christopher Bailey, the longtime Burberry chief
creative offi cer who had become CEO in mid-2014.
(Bailey in turn had taken over from Burberry leader
Angela Ahrendts, who left the company for a posi-
tion at Apple.) “Riccardo has a unique ability to
create beautiful products that resonate with mul-
tiple audiences at once,” Gobbetti says by email. For
Gobbetti, who ran Givenchy from 2004 to 2008, this
is his second collaboration with Tisci. “Burberry is a
global brand, and we have a responsibility to listen
to a new generation of global consumers and speak
to their passions and concerns,” he says. “There is a
natural alignment between our beliefs and those of
our diverse consumer and employee base, and this is
refl ected in the choices we have made.”
“Marco is amazing. First of all, he is not a CEO
who wants to be a designer,” says Tisci. “He knows a
lot about product and he likes to collaborate; he has a
point of view but doesn’t judge. But mostly, he is very
human. Business is business, but fi rst he cares about
the human side. He is protective.”
Just as Tisci arrived at the house, Burberry
banned the use of real fur and the burning of unsold
stock. During the 2017–18 fi scal year, Burberryburned about $37 million worth of goods, which
caused an outcry when reported. The self-imposed
bans gave Tisci a clean slate; the designer heralded
the change as a new era on his Instagram account,
where he has 2.5 million followers.
Soon after his arrival, he began to break the
boundaries between genders; under Tisci, the
men’s and the women’s studios work more coop-
eratively together. Then he introduced a designated
day each month for the Burberry B Series drops,
a separate line of limited-edition pieces, includ-
ing bomber jackets with black-on-black Union
Jacks and a logo-covered hoodie for dogs. The
24-hour-only app-based, direct-to-consumer sales
emulate the streetwear paradigm. While many lux-
ury fashion houses have frothed about streetwear as
a style—introducing thousands of iterations of fancy
sneakers—few have understood the fundamentals of
the streetwear business model, which was based on
reasonably priced, easy clothing. But the most cru-
cial element is the drop, which marks a signifi cant
shift at Burberry.
Yet perhaps Tisci’s biggest move at Burberry is to
not gear everything toward millennials, whether he
is their king or not. “You need to sell dreams, and not
just to young people,” says Tisci. “You need to sell
clothes. The most important thing to understand
is the reality. Christopher [Bailey] built an empire.
There is creativity and there are dreams, but people
actually want it, they want to own it.”
He continues: “We know what people like. We see
what sells out. Of course people love the trench, but
now women buy tailoring at Burberry, they buy a day
dress. We have built the identity.”
Around the world, high fashion is shifting in a
seismic way. The death of Karl Lagerfeld in February
this year seemed to herald the end of an era, what
might be thought of as fashion’s own Belle Epoque.
The old certainties are no longer there; the system,
with its formula for big-brand reinvention, a time-
table of show spectacles and buying, plus a halo
around the designer’s head, does not look as all-
conquering as it once did. Like the once-almighty
fi lm studio system, the fashion system, with its simi-
lar blending of art and commerce, unrelenting pace
and high-profi le moguls, is now transitioning into
something more fractured.FROM LEFT: LARS NIKI/GETTY; LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY; STEVE GRANITZ/GETTY; DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY; MARC PIASECKI/GETTY; GORUNWAY.COM(4); COURTESY OF BURBERRY (2)131LOOK OUT
“Society is changing—
everything is out there,
everything is real, so
people cannot lie. If all
your team are yes men,
then the public will
say no. They’ll say it’s
shit,” says Tisci, who
posts regularly to his
2.5 million followers on
Instagram.Burberry has been at the forefront in trying to
assess this new configuration, particularly in the
digital sphere. Live-streaming fashion shows and
tech-company collaborations—techniques Burberry
helped pioneer—have become commonplace. But at
other times the company’s experiments have fallen
flat, such a s its 2016 effor ts to pivot to a “see now, buy
now” model. Tisci has a natural affinity for the digi-
tal realm and the overall democratization of fashion.
He never patronizes consumers, instead relishing
direct communication with them.
“If you are working on a big scale you need to
present a lot of product,” he says. “Of course, fash-
ion people like it to be about the show. But with a
company like Burberry the picture is much bigger.
For the lady in the middle of some other country, she
needs to know what she can buy.”
“Riccardo turned up in a bit of a whirlwind; he had
to hit the ground running,” says graphic designer
and art director Peter Saville. Saville, who is known
for his designs of ’70s and ’80s album covers for the
English music label he co-founded, Factory Records,
was chosen by Tisci to reinvent the Burberry logo.
He also tasked him with inventing the new Thomas
Burberry monogram, which was introduced in
August 2018.
“I think it came as a bit of a shock to the house
that he wanted to rebrand as soon as he did, in time
for his first collection,” says Saville. “I met with
Riccardo; he was in a meeting room with a large
archive of Burberry material—but the answer was
not in a ready-made of the past. He said to me: ‘Peter,
finding the right Burberry to put in a trench coat
is not difficult. But the same Burberry in a chiffon
blouse, that’s my problem.’ I knew exactly what he
meant; it was the entire context for and challenge of
Burberry in a nutshell.” Saville’s answer was to look
to “obscure, midcentury British fetish references.
To ladies in rubber coats and headscarves.” This
feeling of “sexy, rural, luxe,” as Saville puts it, was
joined with a new version of a monogram: “a combin-
ing of the past with the present; an historic B with a
streamlined T, the two interwoven.”
Another of the first things that Tisci did on his
arrival at Burberry was a capsule collection in col-
laboration with one of his fashion heroes, Vivienne
Westwood. The collection, created with Westwood
and her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, was unveiled
in December 2018 and included miniskirts, stockings
and platform wingtip heels, all in Burberry’s signa-
ture plaid. Westwood joins Tisci’s other extended
British fashion family members, such as photographer
Nick Knight and his long-standing show stylist Katy
England. “I’ve always had very tough people around
me, like my family. Never yes men,” says Tisci. “Society
is changing—everything is out there, everything is
real, so people cannot lie. If all your team are yes men,
then the public will say no. They’ll say it’s shit.”
“Riccardo sets himself these huge challenges,
but he is always unafraid,” explains England, who
has worked with Tisci since 2011. “He is living and
breathing and driving everything. You really have to
be like that. He came to this very British house and
wanted to be surrounded by very British people. He
likes how messy we are—he talks about that messy
sense of British style a lot. He’s also very human.”This has manifested in archetypes that Tisci has
dubbed the lady, the gentleman, the boy and the girl.
Salon meets street, the aristocrat and the every-
man in that peculiarly British way, where punks and
princesses sit side by side. Past and present, com-
merciality and kink, applied across generations.
The latest show, for the spring/summer 2020
season, took place in London on September 16. This
was the third presentation overseen by Tisci. Here,
the lady, the gentleman, the boy and the girl were in
evidence, as they had been in his two sprawling pre-
sentations before, and yet a new spirit had entered
the proceedings: The demarcations among these
characters had begun to collapse; further blurring
the lines, a new, softer sensuality infused the col-
lection for both sexes, ginghams and lace replacing
the checks and flags of the fall season. Above all, this
was the collection where Riccardo Tisci discovered
how to be himself at Burberry.
The next day, sitting in the glinting sunshine
at Little House, a Mayfair members’ club, the
designer is happy: “This is the most British collec-
tion I’ve done—it was a modern interpretation ofBritishness.” He explains that the inspiration drew
from the Victorian obsession with gingham, which,
he says, was also worn by mods and punks. “For me,
it would have been all gingham—Katy England had
to stop me. It’s pa r t of h istoric moments in Engla nd.”
Yet beyond the bravura display of British lineage
and his personal fascination with the Victorian era,
something more was at play. “In fashion the most
important word is editing,” explains Tisci. “Now if
you want to be successful, it’s identity editing,” he
says, referring to his concept of personifying various
consumer archetypes. “You can do a beautiful show
with one skirt and one jacket; you’ll be applauded
by fashion people. [But] if you want the people, you
need to present this, this, this and this. It is what a
younger generation loves and what our generation
does not understand.
“It is my one-year anniversary today, by the way,”
he says, referring to the date of his first show. “Me
and Marco, we think we have so much to do; we have
not done enough. But it’s about balance: when you
stop the identity of the past and begin the identity
of the future.”Ǖ