Star Struck Style

I woke up to news that Daniel Lee is joining Burberry as the heritage brand’s Creative Director.

I really didn’t warm up to Lee at Bottega Veneta. In my opinion, the shoes he had to fill when Tomas Maier left the Italian luxury house were just too big to fill. I know that plenty of people raved about his tenure at BV, but I wasn’t a fan. Reading the reviews of last week’s Bottega Veneta show helmed by Lee’s former number-two, Matthieu Blazy, I get the feeling that the fashion press were growing weary of Lee’s modus operandi, anyway. He was doing that weird-for-the-sake-of-weird thing that Jonathan Anderson gets away with at Loewe.

Nevertheless, Lee is an Aquarius. Ricardo Tisci, the outgoing Creative Director at Burberry, is a Leo. Christopher Bailey, the previous Creative Director at Burberry and the man who grew the brand into what it is today, is a Taurus. In “Star Struck Style,” I put Burberry under the Taurus umbrella for many reasons, but mostly because of the connection between the brand and the British countryside.

Even at his experimental weirdest, Tisci still paid homage to Burberry’s heritage. I doubt that Daniel Lee is going to follow the same path. For that reason, I’m not optimistic about what he can do to permanently turn around the fortunes of Burberry.

It’s really weird to me that two designers with fixed sun-signs that square the sign that I associate with the label have been chosen to “reinvigorate” or “reinvent” the brand. I’d be more optimistic if I would have read that Burberry had poached a Scorpio — and a Brit — like Stuart Vevers from Coach (in my grand scheme of fashion astrology, signs in opposition tend to have more in common than signs square to one another). Maybe Burberry needs to aspire to be more like Coach, anyway. I’m not sure that the strategy to put the brand on par with Dior and Chanel has been all that successful. The numbers don’t lie.

Anyway, I’m not optimistic about this move. I don’t believe it’s going to be a good fit in the long run. On the bright side, maybe this move will free up Tisci to put his own name on his creations. After all these years, I’m surprised that a Leo like him hasn’t launched his own brand. He’s as a good as it gets, and I would be thrilled to see what he has to offer the world of fashion when he isn’t trying to live up to someone else’s legacy.

I guess we’ll see how this all works out soon enough . . .