London Fashion Week - Burberry Prorsum SS14

Backstage Beauty 

The Burberry SS14 show can be summed up in one phrase - Ladies over Tea. Featuring beautiful English lace and macarame lace pencil skirts and fitted dresses in shades of soft pastel, and paired with soft Scottish cashmere cardigans and wool wrap coats, I would say this is one of Burberry's most feminine collections yet.

The color palette reminded me of one of Claude Monet's water lily paintings - generous swatches of rose pik, mint, lavender and pale yellow, paired off with neutral colors of greys and camel browns for the coats. The collection was well edited and elegantly styled - showcasing a good mix of texture and colors. Belts with applique flowers cinched the waist to enhance the feminine silhouette, offset with a merino wool wrap coat, or contrasted with a macrame lace dress embellished with diamantes. The clutches and heels in neon pops of color were especially beautiful together, with the clutch bags carried folded and crushed, almost as though the lady had left in a hurry to catch her next appointment.

I am personally a sucker for lace, so I enjoyed how Christopher Bailey has made use of lace and garters to make the look of English ladies more playful and modern. Altogether, although the collection did not propose any new ideas, it kept to Burberry's British heritage and classic silhouettes and was very beautifully executed.

I was invited to the Burberry flagship store on Regent Street for the livestream of the show and was pretty much blown away by the sheer size of the store. Spanning two storeys with a beautifully tiled domed ceiling, the store offered Burberry's entire womenswear and menswear range and was outfitted with multiple touch screens to help customers with selection of items in the catalogue. I was served champagne and invited to seat on the stools laid out in the store's 'main square'. As the rose petals softly fell down at the final walk through, applause broke and shortly followed by the glowing screens of iPhones as people hurried to snap photos and Instavideos.

No surprise there, because the entirely Burberry show video and digital brand content was shot on the iPhone 5S, placing Burberry once again at the forefront of digital engagement.