Burberry dressed polar explorers and Everest climbers before it dressed the catwalk
When Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole and Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica, their gear came from a draper's shop founded in Basingstoke. Thomas Burberry had invented gabardine, a tough weatherproof cloth that still breathed. George Mallory wore it on Everest in 1924, and soldiers wore it in the trenches.
Thomas Burberry was a 21-year-old former draper's apprentice when he opened his own shop in Basingstoke, Hampshire, in 1856. He built the business around outdoor clothing, and in 1879 introduced gabardine, made by waterproofing the yarn before it was woven, so the fabric shed rain without trapping sweat. A London shop in the Haymarket followed in 1891, and the equestrian knight logo, with the Latin word Prorsum, meaning forwards, was designed in 1901 and registered in 1909.
Adventure made the name. Burberry outfitted Amundsen from 1911 and Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition. During the First World War it adapted its coats for officers in the trenches, creating the trench coat, which civilians adopted once peace returned. The famous check was being used as a coat lining by the 1920s. The motorcycling Debenham sisters recommended the trench coat in a 1928 guide for women riders, and the aviator Mrs Victor Bruce flew around the world in 1930 in a reversible Burberry, gabardine outside for the cockpit and tweed inside to look smart for waiting photographers. In 1937 a Burberry-sponsored plane flew from London to Cape Town and back faster than anyone before.
The family ran the firm until 1955, when Great Universal Stores bought it. Licensing deals in the 1970s and later, notably in Japan and Spain, spread the brand abroad; the Japanese licensee alone was generating sales of about 435 million euros. From 1997, chairman Victor Barnett and chief executive Rose Marie Bravo set about restoring Burberry as a luxury house, leading to its stock market listing in 2001, the year designer Christopher Bailey arrived; he later served as chief executive until 2017.
The revival had an awkward side. Between 2001 and 2005, cheaper products and a flood of counterfeit check prints tied the pattern to so-called chav and football casual culture, and some venues banned Burberry check altogether.
Source: Burberry
