Supreme reminded us why we loved Burberry Prorsum so much The two brands' new collaboration is a flashback to the Christopher Bailey era

Before Riccardo Tisci revolutionized the brand, from 2001 to 2018, Burberry was the undisputed reign of Christopher Bailey. It was the era of Burberry Prorsum, one of three sub-labels first introduced and then eliminated by Bailey himself, whose name, however, represented a very specific era for the brand and its place in the fashion world. It is precisely this era that has been evoked with the recent collaboration between Burberry and Supreme whose lookbook released yesterday - a time when the brand's image was in crisis and the brand itself «had become the butt of tabloid jokes after its distinctive check was adopted on football terraces and by soap opera stars not feted for their elegance», as Jess Cartner-Morley wrote years ago on The Guardian. The Bailey era had been a double-sided moment in history: on the one hand there was the restyling initiated by the designer and based on, to quote Vogue, «British cultural nostalgia and class awareness»; on the other hand, there was the now consolidated presence of the brand in the repertoire of the culture of chavs and hooligans. The double life continued on the "real" market with, on the one hand, the more formal Burberry Prorsum suits or the more casual ones of the London and Brit lines and, in the world of vintage and knock-offs, in more sporty items entirely covered in the famous beige plaid pattern.

In fact, a valid predecessor of the Supreme lookbook seen today is the brand's collaboration with Gosha Rubchinskiy in his SS18 collection, which reinterpreted the chav imagery in a much more extreme way than that of Supreme. It is precisely this implicit acceptance, however, that highlights how subcultures remain today the most durable way to ferry the recognition of a brand from one generation to another. At the after party of that show, Bailey told i-D:

«It crosses different privileged backgrounds, working class backgrounds, cultures, subcultures, music, the arts, football, sports, and I love that diversity. I think it's what makes Britishness British»