Burberry Prorsum Pre-Fall 2012

There’s a special atmosphere of something softer and more romantically English country house–like around Christopher Bailey’s prefall Burberry collection. It isn’t that he is plunged completely right into a vintage narrative, but there is a feel of a thirties aristocratic house party inside the long, slim, langorous crêpe evening dresses with their puffed sleeves, the smart tailored coats with fitted, seamed waists, the corduroy jackets and narrow skirts with peplumed pockets, the muted colors and vaguely chintzy chrysanthemum prints. Agreed, the narrow flares, military bomber jackets, and sweaters with an owl cartoon at the front are hardly “period” dress-these are the predicted continuations of Burberry’s young, contemporary pieces. Still, despite the stylized way Burberry photographs its lookbooks, there’s enough of the Nancy Mitford heroine (or is it Wallis Simpson?) about this collection to endanger a guess at what the most Burberry collection might appear as if by the point it’s fully fledged for the runway show in London in February. Even the accessories which are on exhibit at Burberry’s giant headquarters on Horseferry Road offer a touch concerning the thirties research that should have been done by the design teams. On display: modernized cloches, felt hats that wouldn’t look misplaced walking the moors at Balmoral, and new, box-shaped evening bags whose ancestry clearly goes back to Art Deco Bakelite minaudières.                   

All of this adds as much as a Burberry proposition which feels nicely secure with itself this season-simultaneously at home with that hint of nostalgic Britishness and the pointy technical modernity Bailey brings to the emblem. What’s really clever is the way in which those two strands fuse inside the fabric and cut of this collection’s outerwear. Here, Bailey updates salt-and-pepper tweed and twill (lovely to have a look at of their traditional form, but too bulky and scratchy to wear nowadays) in coat shapes in soft, lightened-up material which might be close-cut into seamed torsos and narrow sleeves, after which gives a springy volume to a belled skirt below. The effect? Feminine and vaguely princess-like, but lithe and unforced. Hard to not imagine this is not an instantaneous attract a undeniable new member of the British royal family. Those coats look much like something the Duchess of Cambridge will want for all those outdoor public engagements she’ll be attending in 2012.