Five British explorers froze to death inside a Burberry tent in 1912, just 12 and a half miles from a supply depot that held food and fuel. When a search party found their bodies eight months later, the fabric was intact. The tent had done exactly what it was designed to do; the men inside it had simply run out of time. It was the culmination of a transformation that began decades earlier.
Thomas Burberry, born in 1835 to a Surrey farming family, was apprenticed to a draper in Basingstoke when he noticed something in the 1850s: shepherds working through heavy rain in loose linen smocks stayed dry while everyone else ran for shelter. The insight was simple but revolutionary: treat the thread before it is woven rather than coating the finished cloth. By 1879, he had patented gabardine, a breathable, tightly woven twill fabric of proofed Egyptian cotton that repelled water without trapping heat or sweat like rubberized Mackintoshes. The fabric found its first market among sporting gentry—hunters, polo players, and cricketers—and by 1891 Burberry had opened a shop in London’s Haymarket.
The product then crossed into history through polar exploration. Fridtjof Nansen chose gabardine for his 1893 Arctic expedition. Ernest Shackleton wore it on both his 1907 and 1914 expeditions. Roald Amundsen wore it when he reached the South Pole first.
Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition used Burberry tents, and the coat’s association with British endurance became permanent. During the First World War, the War Office commissioned Burberry to produce waterproof coats for officers. The trench coat, as it became known, included D-rings for equipment, epaulets for rank, a gun flap for rifle recoil, a throat latch against gas, and wrist straps for waterproofing. Half a million were produced.
But the coat carried a darker consequence: German snipers learned to identify officers by their distinctive cut, and the garment meant to protect its wearer made him a target. After the war, returning officers kept wearing the coats, cementing the style’s association with authority and class. Thomas Burberry died in 1926. The company passed into the hands of Great Universal Stores (GUS) in 1955, which pursued an aggressive licensing strategy that scattered the brand name across products and countries, particularly Japan, with minimal oversight from London.
Meanwhile, the Burberry check—a caramel, black, red, and white tartan introduced in the 1920s as a private interior lining, meant only to confirm authenticity to the wearer—slowly migrated to the outside of the garment. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the check appeared on scarves, umbrellas, and increasingly, on counterfeits. The pattern became ubiquitous, and its meaning shifted dramatically in Britain. Football casuals adopted it as camouflage, wearing designer labels that policed forces would not associate with hooliganism.
It became the uniform of the “chav,” a loaded class caricature. The turning point came in 2002, when a photograph of the soap actress Daniella Westbrook, dressed head-to-toe in Burberry check with her daughter in a matching outfit and pushchair, became tabloid fodder and the single most damaging image in the brand’s history. Pubs across England banned the pattern outright. Rose Marie Bravo, who left the presidency of Saks Fifth Avenue to lead Burberry in 1997, had made the check fashionable again through campaigns with Mario Testino and Kate Moss.
The success of that strategy, combined with the licensing regime and the counterfeiting explosion, set the stage for the crisis she could not control. Her successor, Yorkshire-born Christopher Bailey, who served as creative director and later chief executive, executed a radical correction: the check was reduced from 20% to under 5% of visible product, and baseball caps—the item most associated with the stereotype—were discontinued entirely. Burberry terminated its Japanese license, bought back franchise operations, and refocused on the trench coat itself. The strategy worked financially.
Revenue grew, and the company was valued at 7 billion pounds at its peak. The rebranding had human costs. In 2007, Burberry closed its Treorchy factory in South Wales, laying off 309 workers in a community with few alternative employers, sparking national outrage. In 2018, journalists revealed that Burberry had destroyed approximately 90 million pounds worth of unsold goods over five years, including 28.
6 million pounds in a single year—a practice the luxury industry calls inventory destruction, designed to protect price perception through artificial scarcity. Burberry quickly announced it would stop burning stock. The same year, Bailey departed. The brand then cycled through creative directors and strategies.
Riccardo Tisci replaced the check with a new monogram, which did not resonate. After the pandemic disrupted global luxury retail, Daniel Lee—another Yorkshire-born designer—made the provocative decision to bring the check back loudly and visibly. His campaign featuring the musician FKA twigs walking through a London estate dressed head-to-toe in the check was widely read as an intentional echo of the Westbrook photograph, reframed from tabloid cruelty to fashion art. The same pattern, the same configuration, an entirely different meaning.
Financial performance under Lee has been mixed. Burberry’s revenue peaked at 2. 97 billion pounds, then fell to 2. 46 billion pounds by fiscal year 2025, with operating profit collapsing to 26 million pounds.
The company announced plans to eliminate 1,700 jobs worldwide amid a broader luxury market contraction. Throughout these upheavals, the production side has remained constant. The gabardine is still woven in Keighley. The trench coat is still assembled in Castleford, West Yorkshire, where workers like Paul Brown, who has been there for over 45 years and whose brothers and wife also work there, perform more than 100 hand-production stages.
The collar alone requires 270 individual hand stitches, and a new worker must complete a 12-month apprenticeship before touching one unsupervised. During the pandemic, the factory retooled to produce 160,000 pieces of PPE for the National Health Service, a return to the brand’s original purpose of protection. The Royal Warrant was renewed by King Charles III in 2024. The Haymarket store still operates.
But in Basingstoke, the chapel Thomas Burberry funded is gone, replaced by a car park. A small plaque is the only trace of the empire built from a rented shop on Winchester Street. The coat being stitched in Castleford today is, in every essential detail, the same coat Thomas Burberry designed for the trenches. The same D-rings, the same storm flap, the same 270 stitches.
The thread never changed. The meaning never stopped changing. From shepherd to explorer to officer to Hollywood archetype to counterfeit template to class marker to burning sacrifice to a 1,990 pound piece of wearable heritage. Luxury, the story suggests, is not a property of objects but of permission—a collective agreement about who is seen wearing the coat and what their presence says about the world it belongs to.
When the boundaries fail, the industry responds with the tools at its disposal: discontinue, burn, rebrand, relaunch. But desire does not respect boundaries or price tags. When enough people want something, they will find a way to have it, and the meaning shifts whether the brand consents or not. The cotton is still growing.
The yarn is still being proofed. The looms are still running in Castleford. The only thing that changes is who gets to wear the coat.
And in the economy of luxury, that has always been the only thing that matters.