July 2019 Issue #31 July 2019 Issue #31 4Guys | Page 15

R iccardo Tisci named his second collection for Burberry “Tempest,” which
referred, per his press release, to “contrasts in British culture and weather.”
The climate—both in political and environmental senses—is a hot-button
subject in these stormy times for the U.K. Yet it’s Burberry’s role as a global
brand to somehow project a positive message across markets and genera-
tions. Tisci’s intention, he said, is “including, not excluding.”
This time, he flipped the order of the show to begin with his proposals for
youth—girls and boys—followed by new interpretations of the beige-based
formalwear for grown-ups he’d begun in his first collection. Tisci’s affinity
for streetwear is well known from his work at Givenchy. His viewpoint on
British street style is filtered through his nostalgia for his experiences as an
Italian fashion student at Central Saint Martins in the edgy heyday of ’90s
music and club culture—but London now is a very different, and he thinks,
“less free” place. “I observe a lot, now I am living here,” he said. Tisci draft-
ed in MIA—who also studied at Central Saint Martins in the ’90s—to provide
mashed-up soundscapes for the show: “She says the same things as me—
that we need to help young people to have their voice.”
Tisci isn’t overtly a political animal, but past the opening of layered rugby
shirts, some of his incitements for a new kind of youth style came with cod-
ed references to ’90s antiestablishment phases of rave and deconstruc-
tion. There were Vivienne Westwood–like corseted tops (she’s a heroine
he’s already collaborated with) pulled on over a polo shirt, a stretch cycling
dress, or tracksuit bottoms. Some of the boys’ bomber jackets and the girls’
dresses and coats were embedded with what looked like beer-bottle tops.
A grunge moment came glammed up in sequined, corseted lingerie layered
over a white T-shirt. There were upside-down attachments of padded jack-
ets on tweed suits and camel Crombies—a chopped-up knack John Gallia-
no brought to fashion back in the day. And was that a reverb of Oasis-ver-
sus-Blur Brit-pop style, when Tisci sent out a lad wearing a Union Jack flag
billowing from the back of his black puffer coat?
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