The Burberry Trench: Crafting An Icon — The British Coat That Transformed Battlefield Survival Into Style

Britain in the 19th century was a world far removed from the romanticised grandeur immortalised in the novels of the Brontë sisters. 

Beneath the brooding beauty of the Yorkshire moors lay a far grittier reality — one perhaps more faithfully captured in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist: a country intoxicated by progress, empire and industry, where wealth and poverty existed in stark and often uncomfortable proximity. 

Meanwhile, London was swelling into the beating heart of an increasingly interconnected world, its grand boulevards alive with ambition, commerce and spectacle. And beyond them all, as unpredictable as ever, was the English weather — cold, capricious and utterly unforgiving.

Somewhere in Basingstoke, a 21-year-old former draper’s apprentice named Thomas Burberry opens a small outfitter’s shop. He is young, ambitious and, one suspects, already possessed by an unusually modern idea: that clothing should not merely dress the body, but protect it. 

One can almost imagine him standing among bolts of cloth, considering the rain outside and wondering why protection must come at the expense of comfort.

Twenty-three years later, in 1879, that question produces gabardine.

It is the moment upon which the Burberry story pivots. In an age when waterproof garments were often heavy, stiff and uncomfortable, Thomas Burberry develops a tightly woven cotton cloth that is lightweight, breathable, weather-resistant and durable. 

Patented in 1888, gabardine would revolutionise rainwear and become the textile foundation of one of fashion’s most enduring legends. 

Now, 170 years after that young entrepreneur opened his doors, the extraordinary afterlife of his invention is being celebrated at the Victoria and Albert Museum in The Burberry Trench: Crafting An Icon — a free display at V&A South Kensington, open until 3 January 2027.

Housed in the museum’s rarely seen Prince Consort Gallery, the exhibition is deliberately intimate rather than monumental. Yet therein lies its charm. 

Drawing upon rare material from the Burberry Archive and the V&A collection, it condenses a remarkable history into a story about invention, craftsmanship and the restless capacity of fashion to reinvent itself. 

The narrative begins with Invention, appropriately returning us to Thomas Burberry and gabardine. The founder’s genius was not simply to make a better raincoat, but to understand that utility itself could become an aesthetic proposition. 

His philosophy would propel Burberry from a provincial outfitter into a house associated with exploration, adventure and eventually luxury.

Burberry’s London presence expanded in the late nineteenth century, while gabardine travelled considerably further. Explorers adopted the fabric for some of the world’s most demanding journeys: Roald Amundsen and his team reached the South Pole in 1911 equipped with Burberry gabardine clothing and a tent, while Ernest Shackleton wore it during several expeditions. 

But Thomas Burberry’s most consequential legacy was still to come.

In 1912, he patented the Tielocken, the predecessor to the trench coat. When the First World War arrived, Burberry adapted its outerwear for military requirements. The trench emerged as clothing engineered for officers facing mud, rain, wind and the brutal realities of trench warfare.

 Its epaulettes, D-rings, storm shield and other seemingly decorative components were born of practical necessity. Even today, those details remain integral to the silhouette. 

And here lies fashion’s most fascinating contradiction.

A garment created for war would ultimately become a garment of desire.

The trench returned from the battlefield and, over the decades, shed some of its military severity without surrendering its character. By the mid-1960s, its military origins were being celebrated as part of its fashion appeal. 

It moved through cinema, popular culture and metropolitan life until the very features once designed for survival became shorthand for sophistication. 

The exhibition’s second chapter, Craft, invites us to look closer. The hand-finished collar, storm flap, detachable throat latch and distinctive House Check lining are not merely signatures for recognition; they are reminders that the trench’s elegance has always been inseparable from its construction. This is fashion whose beauty is rooted in purpose.

Then comes Creativity, with 19 runway looks spanning the past 25 years, revealing how successive creative visions have challenged, distorted and reimagined the familiar form. Among the exhibition’s highlights are a women’s trench catalogue dating from approximately 1937–44, a mirror-embroidered men’s trench from Autumn/Winter 2015, a pink metallic silk men’s trench from Spring/Summer 2013, a purple baroque-print fringed trench from Winter 2025 and a 1979 Burberry car coat belonging to celebrated British designer Hardy Amies. 

It is an especially persuasive reminder that timelessness does not mean remaining unchanged.

As Oriole Cullen, Senior Curator, Fashion and Textiles at the V&A, observes, the trench is a British fashion staple that “has stood the test of time and continues to evolve”. Carly Eck, Brand Curator at Burberry, similarly describes it as “a global design icon rooted in British craftsmanship” and highlights the archive material being publicly exhibited for the first time.

Even the architecture conspires with the story. Inspired by John Constable’s Hampstead Heath in the V&A collection, a ceiling of clouds hovers above the final section, turning Britain’s famously unpredictable weather into part of the exhibition itself. 

It is an elegant conceit: the very climate that Thomas Burberry sought to protect people from becomes an atmospheric celebration of his legacy.

And then there is the V&A itself.

Few institutions could tell this story with greater cultural resonance. Since its foundation, the museum has preserved the material evidence of how people create, dress, live and imagine. 

Fashion at the V&A is not treated merely as decoration; it is understood as social history, craftsmanship, technology and cultural memory. The museum’s relationship with Burberry therefore feels less like a conventional corporate partnership than a meeting between two custodians of British creative identity.

That relationship will deepen with the planned Burberry Gallery, due to open in autumn 2028 as part of the transformation of the V&A’s fashion galleries, supported by Burberry through a multi-year partnership. 

For the devoted Burberry client, this exhibition offers an unusually compelling thought.

A trench is not simply another luxury purchase.

It is the physical continuation of an idea first conceived by a 21-year-old Englishman who believed clothing could be intelligent. It carries the memory of explorers, officers, craftsmen and designers.

It has travelled from Victorian Britain through Edwardian society, two world wars, post-war modernity, the liberation of the 1960s, the extravagance of the 1980s, the cultural turbulence of the 1990s and the cyber-conscious years of Y2K into our own restless digital age.

And yet it remains remarkably itself.

That may be the most luxurious thing about the Burberry trench: not that it has survived fashion, but that fashion has continually found new reasons to want it.

At the V&A, beneath an imagined British sky, Thomas Burberry’s legacy suddenly feels less like history and more like a living garment — still breathing, still protecting, still evolving.

Some clothes belong to a season. The Burberry trench belongs to Britain.

For tickets and more details, visit https://www.vam.ac.uk/south-kensington today!

*Photos courtesy of V&A Museum South Kensington.