Burberry FW2021-22: Riccardo Tisci’s female lexicon
Thinking back to the darkest days of pandemic, Riccardo Tisci stressed how the condition of forced stasis has allowed him to slow down. He got off, for some time, from the train of an industry that never stops. The designer, Burberry’s creative director for three years, presented the fall/winter 2021-22 collection with a completely new vocabulary.
The first difference compared to past presentations, was his willingness to focus entirely on women’s collections, cutting menswear for the moment. Definitely a different choice from most of the other brands, considering the fact that the new paradigms of femininity are goin to be more inclusive, as gender barriers gradually fade away.
In any case, what is surely evident is that the canons of pure britishness are here declined in a more personal style. A research less geared to market needs, more free. Indeed, “it’s the most free collection I’ve done at Burberry,” Tisci confessed to Vogue. Freedom, the return to the wild, is also what distinguished the naturalist movements at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an era that strongly inspired the designer.
This is materially expressed by coats, protective as armor but also comfortable, enveloping. They are unstructured, as if each piece were taken individually and sewn on to another; like a collage, a creative experiment made of combinations of fabrics, colors and astronomical prints, of which the eight-pointed stars are symbolically associated with Venus. There is no lack of references to the classic codes of the brand, tartan textures take on new colors, on capes, trenches and skirts. The seemingly opposing qualities of sensuality and a fighting spirit (evoked by the helmet-shaped hats) converge, and tell a new feminine lexicon, the most authentic one according to Tisci.
