Burberry comes to town

Dustin Hoffman well remembers his first Burberry mac. “When I was an unemployed actor, everyone said, ‘You’ll never get any work unless you buy a Burberry mac,’” he tells me. Bogart, Bergman, Hepburn, Sellers – all the greats had worn the iconic beige trench. So Hoffman saved up his unemployment cheques. “When I got to four, off I went to Burberry. These were the days when they only had one store – on Madison Avenue.” He says his hands were shaking as he paid the cashier. “As I walked out, all the lights on the block went out. Then the next block. Then the next.” His eyes narrow at the memory. “I almost fainted. I thought it was the shock of spending all that money.” In fact, New York was having a blackout. “True story,” he chuckles. “And then the work did start to come in.”

Small wonder, then, that the cream of today’s young Hollywood have joined Hoffman in a pilgrimage to the relaunch of Burberry’s Beverly Hills store, slap-bang in the heart of LA’s shopping mecca (Gucci to the left of us; Barneys to the right). It represents Stage One of what Team Burberry is calling “America Week”, a tightly scheduled flying visit that will see them take in a shop launch, a Vanity Fair exhibition co-launch and some morale-buffing staff talks (in LA); a meeting with top management at top department store Neiman Marcus, lunch with that store’s best Burberry customers and the acceptance of an award presented by the prestigious Fashion Group International at its 25th annual Night of Stars (in NYC).

Outside, the block is cordoned off. Paparazzi bustle and strain to see the next person shimmying down the white carpet, across the red rope and through the gold doors. Inside, Ryan Gosling, the Oscar-nominated star, mans the decks. “DJing’s all new to me but, you know, I like to keep busy,” he beams. “Idle hands?”

Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s bright-haired and bushy-haired creative director, the 37-year-old responsible for turning the label round from yesterday’s news in the Nineties to super-desirable, super-profitable toast of the fashion industry in the Noughties, greets everyone like old friends. Have they tried the mojitos? What was that like, house-hunting in LA? “When someone talks about being a gentleman, Christopher is a gentleman,” says Cat Deeley, the TV host from over here doing rather well over there, newly thin of ankle and thick of kohl. “I’m his number one fan.”

“He’s done so well,” says Mario Testino, snapper to the stars. “It’s a big job for a young guy. And he’s so hands-on! But then he was trained by Tom Ford.” He rolls his eyes. “Say no more!” The actress Mena Suvari says, “I met Christopher when I was doing a film called Trauma [in 2004] and we needed trench coats. I admire the tradition and the craftsmanship of Burberry. And it’s amazing to find someone in fashion who’s that down-to-earth.”

Billy Zane, resplendent in lime sports jacket and flat cap, does a dance to the Buzzcocks. Kate Beckinsale chitchats to Kate Hudson. Liv Tyler sips Veuve Clicquot. The evening swings. The guests seem to forget the traditional boldface party manoeuvre – photo at the front door, hi to the host, leave through the back door – and let their hair down. They are actually having fun. Job done, Bailey discreetly slips away just after 10pm. He is back in the roof bar of his hotel, the London – “A little piece of England in LA; ridiculous, I know” – by 20 past.

“He was nervous before this,” explains Sam Riley, the English actor who was Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in the film Control, a before-he-was-famous friend of Bailey’s and the star of Testino’s winter ’08 ad campaign for Burberry. “He’s from Halifax and I’m from Leeds. Halifax isn’t LA – it isn’t even Leeds. He’d rather be walking on the moors. “He doesn’t,” advises Riley, “like a w***fest.”

“Well, no,” concedes Bailey the following lunchtime at the London. “I’m not very comfortable in that situation. I’m very aware it’s an important part of the role, but parties are not the reason I’m doing this. I’ve never been intimidated in those situations; I just don’t feel comfortable in them. There’s a difference.” It hardly shows. Bailey is full of carpe diem and has a real curiosity about real people. That was key to his transformation of Burberry. It is the only luxury goods brand to cut through all classes and age groups, able to dress everyone from the Queen to working-class lads, as suited to Milan as it is to Millwall. At 153 years, Burberry is one of the world’s oldest brands, and its democratic reach is in keeping with its founder’s original vision. “Thomas Burberry dressed the royal family and the aristocracy, but also farmers and shepherds,” he explains in his warm, sing-song accent. With the invention of gabardine, Burberry was kitting out Amundsen, the polar explorer. During the First World War, soldiers adopted Burberry’s weather coats and the trench coat was born. In the Forties and Fifties it became as iconic as the film stars who wore it. “I love that it means different things to different people,” Bailey says. “I would hate for us to become this super-exclusive fashion brand.”

Yet by the Nineties, Burberry had lost its way so completely it was scarcely thought of as a fashion brand at all. Bailey arrived from Tom Ford’s Gucci in 2001, aged 29, and immediately took charge of all the in-house designs, plus the higher-end, out-of-house Prorsum line that had failed to catch on. He gently modernised the lot, while emphasising the tradition and culture of the brand’s British heritage.

Burberry went from fusty raincoat merchant to the acme of cool, starting a vogue for venerable, barely remembered labels attempting to “do a Burberry”, with varying degrees of success. Five years ago the brand weathered another storm when Danniella Westbrook and a thousand Essex boys took rather too enthusiastically to the Burberry check, and it briefly became the naffest sartorial statement around – visual shorthand for “chav”. Bailey sidelined the pattern, never removing it, but instead offering remixes and playful twists.

Now the brand is more than holding its own – in tough times. “Burberry’s sales momentum should continue to outperform the broader luxury industry,” commented an analyst at Citigroup last December. Indeed, the label reported a 9 per cent increase in group revenue for the last 3 months of 2008, although retail sales fell by 3 per cent in the last quarter, driven by underperformance in the United States and Spain, where sales had slumped by some 20 per cent. And neither is Burberry immune to the need for belt-tightening: in January it announced 290 job cuts in the UK and angered unions by closing its sewing factory in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, without telling workers.

By Bailey’s own admission, the brand remained “underpenetrated” in the US. In a flip for a luxury label, it had done better in the Middle East and Japan first. In 2008, it announced sales growth of 40 per cent in the former, and the opening of eight more stores; in the latter, a new licensing venture hoped to give Burberry “full exposure” to “the largest accessories market in the world”. Bailey appreciated the work that a combination of “people seeing the face behind the brand” and an A-list-endorsed shop launch could do during its America Week. “Customers, store staff and clients being afforded face time with a designer is a hugely powerful tool in building loyalty, particularly in this personality-driven time. And that’s very true in the US,” says Harriet Quick, British Vogue’s fashion features director. “Plus, Burberry has global potential. Being an essentially conservative brand of chic, it chimes with the times when people are on the hunt for lasting quality.”

It feels good, too, to see Burberry flying its check flag in the States; a corner of Wilshire Boulevard between Niketown and Ralph Lauren that remains stoically British. “I’m glad you said that,” Bailey enthuses. “I feel very British and I always feel pride when I see one of our stores: this little piece of England, planted there in Beverly Hills.”

Indeed, with his wholesome good looks and strawberry-blond quiff, there is something of the Bridesheads about Bailey himself. That morning he had opened the shop for key press and buyers, shaking hands and grasping shoulders in his trim blazer, smart black jeans and shiny shoes (all Burberry). Over the PA he played an idiosyncratically British mix of Guillemots, James and the Inspiral Carpets, while the LA sun beat down outside. “I love those bands,” he beamed. “Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine are brilliant.” Which is not a sentence you imagine Karl Lagerfeld has ever uttered.

Burberry had already sponsored the London run of Vanity Fair Portraits, a retrospective of photographs from the magazine’s 95-year history. Now it has transferred to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Its launch, the night after the Burberry store event, is a simultaneously grander, yet somehow less high-wattage affair. I arrive to find Bailey staring at a 1991 Helmut Newton portrait of Mrs Thatcher. “It’s my favourite,” he beams. “In London it was bigger. She looked more?” Scary? “Yes!”

An assistant pulls him aside.  The singer/actress Mandy Moore wants to say hi. “Good to see you again!” Minnie Driver wanders over. Robert Evans, the film producer, shuffles past in a bootlace tie, blue-tinted specs and velour tracksuit bottoms. Mario Testino gives George Hamilton a big bear hug – they are complementary shades of orange.

Over in the gift shop, two female assistants are cooing and giggling. They’ve just sold a catalogue to Aaron Eckhart, the buff Thank You for Smoking actor. The event is a hit; a good match for both brands and another box ticked in Burberry’s gentle brand-raising US assault. Over there is Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair editor, looking stately in a gold-buttoned blazer and flyaway Second World War pilot’s hair. Does he have a word for his evening’s sponsor?

“It’s been an honour to work with him,” he booms. “Both our brands are about style and great photography, so it’s a good match. Plus,” – and this is becoming something of a theme – “he’s as nice a man as you can hope to meet.”

Christopher Bailey is an anomaly among his peers. He has not developed a gym-toned body, or produced photography books on Pete Doherty, or cultivated a penchant for wearing dark glasses and wafting a fan. “People have this expectation that you should be a fey, cape-wearing, frivolous person,” he says one afternoon. “I often think people assume I’m some scallywag, and the sunglasses-wearing real designer is trotting along behind me.” Bailey grew up in working-class Yorkshire, the son of a carpenter and a mother who was head of visual display at Marks & Spencer. At 18 he won a place on a two-year fashion course at the Royal College of Art in London, and graduated with an MA in 1994. Donna Karan loved his book and, at the seasoned age of 22, he was on a plane to New York to become part of her team. He joined Gucci as senior designer of womenswear just as Tom Ford was leading the brand through unprecedented reinvention and expansion. “His sketches were terrific,” Ford says. “Plus, someone told me to only hire people you want to have dinner with.”

He remains happiest in Yorkshire, among “the cows and trees” of his childhood or playing with his dog, George, a brown labrador. In 2005, his “situation changed from black to white” when his partner, Geert Cloet, brand director of Miu Miu, died of a brain tumour. “That experience puts everything in perspective. It makes you love life every day. It completely changed the way I approach everything. Life’s too short to be doing things that make you unhappy.”

For Bailey, that means his all-encompassing work with Burberry. He oversees more than 15 collections a year, from £1,700 ruched georgette dresses to iPod covers, and even designs the stores, choosing the panelling and carpets. “That makes me sound like some egomaniac. But there’s nothing I love more than wandering round a construction site with a hard hat on.” What would it take for another label to poach him? “I don’t feel I am poachable,” he says. “I’m the unpoachable Yorkshireman! Burberry’s become my family as well. I’m emotionally involved.” He doesn’t lust after seeing his name along Wilshire Boulevard? “God, no,” he says. “That’s the last thing I’m lusting after.”

It is Thursday evening, and Bailey is due at Cipriani, the upper-crust eatery on Wall Street, in New York. Fashion’s major players have come together for the Night of Stars, where the Fashion Group International, a body overseeing the industry, salutes the year’s best designers. The actress Kate Bosworth was to present the Designer of the Year award to Bailey, but she and her boyfriend, the model James Rousseau, got stuck in traffic on the way to collect him. Now the three of them are stuck in traffic on the way to Cipriani. Inside, reporters line up to get their two cents’ worth with the celebrity guests before they sit down to dine.

The designer Isaac Mizrahi is explaining his tips for evening dressing. “You start with the shoes,” he reveals. “Then everything goes from there.” Karl Lagerfeld appears. Is he looking forward to the night? “I am nearly sick to death with food poisoning,” says the stick-thin man who once said, “I almost never eat.” Donatella Versace arrives. “I love your dress!” coos Mizrahi. Then it is time to sit down. But on table 36, the places for Bailey and Bosworth remain empty. Hugh Dancy is stuck out on his own. The speeches start. Bailey and Bosworth appear at the door. “We’re so late,” Bailey says, grabbing my arm and giggling.

Backstage, there is more giggling. “It was much more heavy-hitting than I had anticipated,” says Bailey afterwards. “There was Donatella, Karl, Anna Wintour, [Italian Vogue editor-in-chief] Franca Sozzani, [Condé Nast chairman] Jonathan Newhouse, Kate and myself; all these major people reciting their lines. We all got the giggles.”

The last time I speak to Bailey, he is back at Burberry’s London HQ, running between design meetings and a talk with the French perfume house that is developing Burberry fragrances. It is too early to gauge the impact of America Week, but he deems it a success. “People were excited about the opening, and lots went back to the store afterwards.” All three events have received extensive, positive press coverage. “I do love the American enthusiasm,” Bailey concludes.

He particularly enjoyed the lunch he’d thrown for Neiman Marcus’s best Burberry customers in New York. “They were so excited, enthusiastic and positive that I left on a real high.” A few had even offered him design tips. “But my friends do that all the time,” he laughs. “‘Why don’t you do this, but in such-a-such a fabric?’ You take what you can from that and disregard the rest. That’s a really nice thing.”

For the unpoachable Yorkshireman – Designer of the Year, but also Designer of the People – it is all in a day’s work.