GEORGIE’S REVIEW: BURBERRY SS21
Fri 18 Sep
London Fashion Week began with a bang with Burberry’s SS21 live-stream. A Riccardo Tisci Burberry show has come to be known as a major, larger than life event. The physical shows are colossal, with model counts hitting around the 150-mark and Tisci dividing the masses into shoppable groups such as the classic Burberry woman or the street-wise younger male.
For SS21, Tisci had brought all the big guns of the physical show to the live-stream. In collaboration with the performance artist Anne Imhof, usually associated with Balenciaga or Vetements, Burberry presented an almost 360-degree performance piece that put creativity and all things out-of-the-box first. While it took some adjusting to not being able to see the garments up close, there was something quite arresting about the sheer volume of this performance piece.
Luckily, the opening scene saw models dressing themselves, apparently due to the pandemic, but it gave the viewer a chance to inspect some of the finer details: Sequinned jackets, Tisci’s recurring balconette bra dresses, a glimpse of a leather pochette. Striped orange mohair jumpers, leather boiler suits and painterly prints that felt reminiscent of Eliza Douglas’ artwork could be spotted between the trees of which this blockbuster was set. This smoke-filled, bright-hued performance piece was, after all, about nature. A mind-bogglingly, visually arresting live-stream, that despite not explicitly feeling like a Burberry show, was still a welcome exhibition in what can be created and done in such times.