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Wednesday, 12 December 2012

The are two sides of Burberry

By Tracy Curry


There was a time, a few years back again, once the country seemed to get coated within a perpetual layer of Burberry check. It surfaced on every little thing - on coats and purses and scarves; on suitcases, handbags and skirts. When it rained, the streets erupted in a flurry of Burberry umbrellas. But, there is certainly a single impression inside the history of Burberry that sticks in the thoughts, using the exact same lingering cloy like a half-sucked toffee: a picture in the actress Daniela Westbrook clad top to toe in Burberry check: the hat, the skirt, the scarf, her baby dressed approximately match, as though she experienced gorged herself upon it, rolled about in it just like a pig in muck. It appeared such as the stop in the significantly heralded Burberry revival: the Burberry check experienced grows to be the greatest image of nouveau prosperous Neff.

Yesterday, nonetheless, Burberry introduced some striking news. The company's product sales around the world inside the six months to March were 13% greater than the usual yr in the past, or 15% ignoring currency actions. Although the figure may not sound large, it really is about as good as it receives in retailing today: Signifies & Spencer, for example, yesterday reported a 2.5% fall in clothing sales. The numbers tell the story of Burberry's extraordinary turnaround: when Rose Marie Bravo was recruited from Saks Fifth Avenue, the New York department store, to grow to be chief executive in 1997, Burberry experienced sales of about ?250m and made profits of about ?25m. After yesterday's results, City analysts predict the label will this yr report turnover of ?670m, and profits of ?134m.

When Bravo arrived, things were so bad that major department stores Harvey Nichols and Selfridges did not even stock Burberry ranges, and Harrods only carried the traditional raincoats. It was a neglected brand facing what looked just like a slow but inevitable demise. By contrast, Burberry's stock market value is now? 1.8bn. That makes it more valuable than Canary Wharf, owner of Europe's largest office development, or worth about exactly the same as Corus, the successor to the old British Steel. All of which prompts the question: just how has it emerged from obscurity, through mass-market tackiness to become a powerful global brand again?

The story in the Burberry revival is a story of paradoxes. Bravo was recruited by then-owner Great Universal Stores, who's other businesses - property and mail-order shopping were a million miles from the catwalk. It's hard to escape the irony that the company which now owns Argos and Home base also owns the lion's share of a single from the world's most prestigious luxury brands. And the identical contradictions apply to Burberry's appeal: the famous check that seems the essence of sophisticated Brutishness to many foreign customers is also the favorite badge of a rather less refined breed of football supporter.

"Show me the clothes of a nation and I can write its history," proclaimed Anatolia France, and indeed it seems the red, camel, black and white from the Burberry examine is intimately entwined with all the red, white and blue of Brutishness. In 1856, inside the humble environs of Basingstoke, a former apprentice draper named Thomas Burberry opened an outfitters' shop specializing in outdoor wear. Some 14 many years later, Burberry invented gabardine, a breathable fabric, the yarn waterproofed before weaving, which was largely to prove the making of him.




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