The Changing Face of Burberry: Britishness, Heritage, Labour and Consumption

Global fashion markets, particularly those aimed at prosperous millennial consumers, are in thrall to Burberry, and connect the company’s output in the twenty first century to a quintessential notion of British tradition. The Changing Face of Burberry examines how the company successfully built this sense of tradition and how it has retained and capitalised on it within contemporary consumer culture. It charts the company’s modest beginnings in semi-rural Hampshire in 1856 when it primarily produced waxed smocks for agricultural workers and follows the ebbs and flows of its fortunes over its one-hundred-and-fifty-year history beginning when the company established links to the early motorist, the gentleman officer, and the aristocratic adventurer. However, the text also examines what could be seen as Burberry’s more problematic associations, when the luxury brand was sold through Kay’s catalogue and in tourist souvenir stores in the UK, to its inextricable links to ‘chav’ culture

Combining interviews with some of the workforce who lost their jobs when the company relocated its production overseas in 2007, with close analysis of advertising campaigns from the late nineteenth to the twenty first century, The Changing Face of Burberry provides an authoritative account of shifting forms of British identity, consumer culture and fashion production in Britain. The text situates Burberry’s development into a context that spans two centuries, running from an era when garments were made by a single hand, through to a digitized and global marketplace where many consumers have a purely online relationship with the brand.