London's Link and Lace

A house that lost its way chasing handbags was told to go home and sell outerwear, and the lesson applies well beyond one check lining

Burberry and the Trench Coat

There is a coat in my wardrobe that I bought second-hand in 2009 from a shop in Notting Hill. Honey-coloured cotton gabardine, belted, with the check lining. It was already twenty years old. It has been rained on in four countries. I had the cuffs rebound last winter and it will see me out.

I mention it because the company that made it spent a good part of the last decade trying to be something other than the company that made it. And the story of how it stopped is, I think, the most instructive thing to have happened in British fashion lately.

What Went Wrong

The short version is handbags.

The enormous profits in luxury over the past twenty years have been in leather goods. A handbag has a margin that a coat can only dream of. So every house wanted to be a handbag house. Burberry raised its prices, pushed bags and tried to move up to sit alongside the French and Italian names.

It did not work. The customer who would pay two thousand pounds for a bag wanted it from Paris or Milan. The customer who loved Burberry for its coats found the coats harder to see. When luxury demand weakened, particularly in China, the company was caught in the middle.

In 2024 it dropped out of the FTSE 100 after fifteen years. It reported a loss. There was talk of a takeover.

The Change of Course

A new chief executive arrived that summer, an American with a retail background. His diagnosis was simple enough to fit on a label. The company had forgotten what it was for.

A Reuters report from July 2025 described the early months. Investors, it said, were pleased with early signs of recovery even though sales were still falling. One was quoted approving of improvements in product range, pricing and marketing. The report noted that the brand had widened its range of outerwear by more than a fifth and brought in less expensive bags.

Read that again. More coats. Cheaper bags. The reverse of the previous plan.

It came at a cost. The same period saw a cost-cutting programme affecting around 1,700 jobs, close to a fifth of the workforce. A turnaround is not a pleasant thing to be on the wrong end of.

By September 2025 an agency report recorded that the company had rejoined the FTSE 100, a year after leaving it, with its shares up 86 per cent over the twelve months. It closed London Fashion Week that evening, vowing, in the report’s words, to win back customers with its signature outerwear.

I do not have this autumn’s trading figures and shall not guess at them. Whether the recovery has held is for the next results to say. The strategy is what interests me.

Why the Coat Is the Point

The trench coat is not just a product. It is the reason the company exists.

Its founder developed gabardine, a tightly woven, weatherproofed cotton, in the 1870s. The coat that became the trench was made for officers in the First World War. The D-rings on the belt, the storm flap on the shoulder, the epaulettes: all of it had a purpose. After the war the men kept wearing them, and then everyone did.

That is a hundred and fifty years of doing one thing very well. No handbag has that. Nobody can copy it, because the history is not for sale.

A brand with that in the cupboard and a bag in the window has its priorities upside down.

The Lesson for Everyone Else

I see the same mistake across the industry, at every price.

A knitwear company decides it must do trainers. A shirtmaker launches fragrance. A shoe brand opens a cafe. Each is chasing someone else’s margin. And each time, the thing they were actually good at gets a little less attention, a little less of the best cloth, a slightly worse position in the shop.

The customer notices. She may not be able to say what has changed. She just stops coming back for the jumper.

Knowing what you are for is the hardest discipline in fashion, because fashion is by nature restless. It always wants to be the next thing. The brands that last are the ones that manage to be restless about everything except the centre.

The Other Side

I should give the counter-argument, because the people who pushed the handbag strategy were not fools.

A trench coat is bought once a decade. Mine is thirty-seven years old. From the point of view of a company that needs to grow every quarter, I am a terrible customer. A bag, a scarf, a pair of sunglasses: those are bought more often and by more people.

A business cannot live on raincoats alone. The question is whether the other things flow from the coat or compete with it. A check scarf does the first. A two-thousand-pound tote in a shape borrowed from Paris does the second.

There is also a limit to heritage. A brand that only looks backward becomes a museum shop. The trick is to make the coat feel like something a twenty-five-year-old wants now, not something her grandfather wore. That needs design, not just archives.

What I Tell People Who Ask What to Buy

Buy the thing a brand is known for. From the knitwear people, the knitwear. From the shirtmaker, a shirt. From the house that built its name on gabardine, a coat.

It is where their best people work. It is where they cannot afford to cut corners. And it is the thing that will still look right in twenty years, because it has already looked right for a hundred.

And if the new price makes your eyes water, go to Notting Hill. There is a rail of them. They improve with rain.

The London Prat, which has been observing the British in their macs since 1961, covers the subject in its British satirical news on the trench coat and its London satirical news about heritage brands. Bohiney Magazine reports that Americans call it a raincoat and wear it open.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/