Burberry held its show in the vaulted Victorian ironwork hall at Olympia, a London venue that must have been constructed around the time that Thomas Burberry began his company. As a huge publicly traded corporation, operating globally, it is now stepping up efforts to do better with its carbon footprint, stating not only that the show venue was “certified sustainable,” but that the company is investing in “carbon offsetting” initiatives with regenerative agriculture and agroforestry in Australia via Pur Projet (whose work can be read up on the charity’s website.)
The idea that today a fashion company is thinking about taking responsibility for something happening on the other side of the world perhaps isn’t so strange—we all live on the same planet. Riccardo Tisci also shared his ideas about global influences in his collection, talking about how he’d lived in India and learned meditation in a phase of his life after studying in multicultural London at Central Saint Martins, and before he started his own label in Italy.
There was certainly something calmer about the presentation, compared to Tisci’s more frenetic efforts to cover every age and class segment at his debut. “I think it was much more together this time,” he said. It’s a leap to connect a British lifestyle brand designed by an Italian amidst Brexit politics, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised that his government will bring people together, and look outward, to opportunities on continents beyond Europe as it stands alone on the world stage. India, for example, is a major target for new trade.