When Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, he was wrapped in Burberry gabardine. When Robert Falcon Scott’s five-man team reached it weeks later and died on the return journey, they perished inside a Burberry tent that remained intact when their bodies were found eight months later. By the First World War, half a million Burberry trench coats had been issued to British officers—and German snipers learned to target them. Yet by 2002, the same brand had become the uniform of football hooligans and tabloid villains.
Pubs across England banned anyone wearing its signature check pattern. The fabric that dressed polar explorers and kings had been transformed into a symbol of working-class defiance and mockery. The coat never changed. The stitching, the cotton, the 270 hand-sewn collar stitches made in the same Yorkshire factory by the same families for generations—all stayed the same.
What changed was who wore it. Thomas Burberry was born in 1835 in Brockham Green, Surrey, the son of a farmer. In the early 1850s, as an apprentice draper in Basingstoke, he noticed something that would define his life: shepherds working in heavy rain stayed dry under loose linen smocks. Rather than coating finished cloth, as rubberized Mackintoshes did, Burberry realized the thread itself could be treated before weaving.
He opened his own shop in 1856 at age 21, and by 1879 he had registered the trademark for gabardine—a breathable, tightly woven twill of proofed Egyptian cotton. Gabardine was revolutionary because it resisted wind and rain while allowing sweat to escape. It became the choice of British sportsmen and, soon after, the gear of polar exploration. Nansen used it on the Fram expedition, Shackleton wore it on both the Nimrod and Endurance, and Scott’s Terra Nova expedition carried Burberry tents and garments to the bottom of the world.
The fabric performed as designed. The men simply ran out of time. When the First World War broke out, the War Office commissioned Burberry to produce waterproof coats for officers only. The trench coat’s details were functional: D-rings for grenades and equipment, epaulets for rank insignia, a gun flap to cushion rifle recoil, a throat latch against gas, and a storm shield across the back.
The coat announced its wearer’s class—and made him a target for German snipers who learned to recognize officers by their distinctive garments. After the war, hundreds of thousands of officers returned to civilian life still wearing their trench coats. The garment became a permanent symbol of British authority and masculine competence. Thomas Burberry died in 1926 at age 90, having seen his fabric reach the South Pole, cross the Atlantic by air, and clothe the officer class of the largest army Britain had ever fielded.
He had built a company whose product’s meaning depended entirely on who was wearing it. The signature Burberry check—a tartan of caramel, black, red, and white—was introduced in the 1920s as an interior lining. It was never meant to be seen by anyone except the wearer. For decades, it stayed hidden inside trench coats.
Hollywood amplified the coat’s mythology: Humphrey Bogart wore a trench coat in Casablanca, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Burberry grew steadily as a reliable, understated British brand. The turning point began in 1955, when Burberry was acquired by Great Universal Stores, a conglomerate that launched an aggressive licensing program. The brand name and check were scattered across dozens of product categories and countries.
In Japan, a licensed operation generated hundreds of millions of euros annually with minimal oversight from London. Through the 1980s, the check moved from accessories into ready-to-wear clothing and appeared everywhere—including baseball caps and dog collars. The pattern escaped the brand’s control. Counterfeits flooded markets from Manchester to Manila.
By the turn of the millennium, Burberry’s global brand sales exceeded 2 billion pounds, but the United Kingdom represented only 7 percent of revenue. Meanwhile, British football casuals—working-class supporters who adopted expensive designer labels—made the check part of their uniform. It became a confrontational symbol, and the tabloids dubbed its wearers “chavs. ”
In 2002, the actress Daniella Westbrook, a working-class woman with a publicly known cocaine addiction, was photographed on Bond Street dressed head-to-toe in Burberry check, alongside her young daughter in a matching outfit and pushchair.
The photograph became the most damaging image in the brand’s history. The tabloids framed it as evidence of what happened when the wrong people acquired luxury goods. Pubs, golf clubs, and other venues began banning the check itself. The meaning of the pattern had inverted: it now signaled threat, not respectability.
Burberry’s response revealed the hidden mechanics of the luxury industry. To maintain artificial scarcity—the foundation of luxury pricing—the company destroyed unsold stock. In the fiscal year ending March 2018, it burned 28. 6 million pounds worth of goods.
Over the preceding five years, it had destroyed roughly 90 million pounds of product. When The Times and other outlets reported this in 2018, the public reacted with fury. Environmental groups called it vandalism; social commentators called it obscene. Burberry announced it would stop burning unsold stock and work toward sustainable sourcing by 2025.
The person tasked with saving the brand was Rose Marie Bravo, a Bronx-raised Italian-American executive who had left her role as president of Saks Fifth Avenue to become CEO of Burberry in 1997. Her New York peers thought she was making a mistake. Bravo understood that Burberry lacked desire, not quality. She hired photographer Mario Testino and model Kate Moss, creating campaigns that made the brand fashionable and young.
Revenue surged. But her success widened the audience for the check, accelerating the conditions for the chav crisis. Christopher Bailey, born in 1971 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, took over as design director in 2001 and later became chief creative officer and CEO alongside Angela Ahrendts. His strategy was radical: he reduced the check from 20 percent of visible product to under 5 percent, discontinued baseball caps entirely, and systematically dismantled the licensing network, including terminating the Japanese license that generated hundreds of millions annually.
He refocused the brand on the trench coat itself—an asset whose authenticity lay in craftsmanship that could not be counterfeited easily. The strategy worked financially. Revenue grew, market capitalization tripled to 7 billion pounds, and Burberry returned to the FTSE 100. But it came at a human cost.
In 2007, Burberry closed its factory in Treorchy, South Wales, eliminating 309 jobs in a community with few alternatives. Workers marched with the Treorchy male voice choir, and MPs demanded intervention. The closure illustrated that the cost of brand transformation is often borne by workers. After Bailey departed in 2018, Burberry cycled through creative directors.
Riccardo Tisci replaced the classic check with a new monogram and stripped away the brand’s Victorian heritage, but the pivot failed to resonate. The pandemic devastated luxury sales. Then came Daniel Lee, a Yorkshire-born designer known for revitalizing Bottega Veneta with quiet luxury. Lee made a provocative decision: he brought the check back, loudly, across entire collections.
He argued that a new generation saw the pattern not as a class marker but as an icon. The campaign that crystallized this argument featured the artist FKA twigs walking through a grey London estate pushing a pram, dressed head-to-toe in Burberry check. It was an unmistakable echo of the Westbrook photograph that had nearly destroyed the brand—but the framing had inverted. Where Westbrook was mocked, twigs was celebrated.
The pattern read as art, not vulgarity. Yet Burberry’s financial performance remained uncertain. Revenue peaked at 2. 97 billion pounds, then fell to 2.
46 billion by fiscal year 2025. Operating profit collapsed to 26 million pounds, and the company announced plans to eliminate 1,700 jobs. The luxury market was contracting due to slowing Chinese demand and a cost-of-living crisis. Burberry was still trying to decide what it was: heritage brand, fashion brand, British institution, or global luxury house.
Through all of this, the factory in Castleford, West Yorkshire, continues to produce the trench coat across more than 100 hand-production stages. The gabardine still comes from the weaving mill at Keighley. The collar still requires 270 individual hand stitches, and new workers must complete a 12-month apprenticeship before being allowed to stitch one unsupervised. The D-rings, storm flap, gun flap, epaulets, throat latch, and wrist straps all remain, even though their military functions are obsolete.
During the pandemic, the Castleford workers retooled to produce 160,000 pieces of PPE for the National Health Service. King Charles III renewed Burberry’s Royal Warrant in 2024, and the Haymarket store that Thomas Burberry opened in 1891 still operates as a flagship. But in Basingstoke, the chapel Burberry funded is gone, and the site where his original shop stood bears no trace of him. In Antarctica, Scott, Wilson, and Bowers remain entombed beneath the ice, along with their Burberry tent, preserved by the glacial flow.
The central truth of Burberry’s 170-year history is that luxury is not a property of objects but of permission. The value of a 1,990-pound coat is sustained not by cotton or stitching but by a collective agreement about who is seen wearing it and what that presence says. The same gabardine, the same check, the same 270 stitches have meant courage, command, romance, defiance, vulgarity, and art—depending entirely on the body inside the coat. Desire does not respect class boundaries, and when enough people want something, the meaning of the object shifts whether the brand consents or not.
In Castleford, the looms are still running. The stitchers are still placing 270 stitches in a collar. The cotton is still growing, the yarn is still being proofed, and the weave is still tight. Whatever the brand becomes next, the coat will be there.
The only thing that changes is who gets to wear it. And in the economy of luxury, that has always been the only thing that matters.