The metamorphosis of Burberry:
How it won, then lost, then won again.
Introduction
My research area is about luxury fashion brand Burberry, and I am interested in its metamorphosis from a rural store catering to the needs of its community, into one of the top five fashion brands in the world.
My first encounter with the Burberry brand when I was Course Director for a series of visual art projects connected to football, branding, and love of the beautiful game during the 1998 World Cup. Two of the groups we were working with – in a programme of four 5-a-side teams – were from Pupil Referral Units and many of them wore Burberry check baseball caps, and steadfastly refused to remove them despite messy workshop conditions. Looking back, I am surprised I didn’t recognise the connection the media has repeatedly made between working class consumption of luxury brands and how that stigmatizes the brand, and it is only in retrospect that the connection is so clear. The groups we were working with had already been identified as having anger management issues and challenging behaviour, however what stood out for me was the loyalty they showed one another in a team situation, and their caps were a way of showing that solidarity and kinship to one another. This was the first time I had personally encountered a link between dress and behaviour, and it flew in the face of subsequent media coverage, as our participants well behaved and engaged with their work.
Six months later I had many questions about this experience: how had these teenagers - average age 15 - found this luxury brand? In 1998, new Burberry CEO Rose Marie Bravo was only one year into the company shake-up, and to some extent the brand was still languishing in the fashion and style backwaters. Was there a link between football and the Nova check? Why had the students from the Pupil Referral Unit chosen Burberry as part of their look?
There is a long history of luxury brand appropriation by sub-cultural groups and in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s seminal book, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post War Britain, John Clarke discusses clothing style at some length as these texts illustrate:
‘Not all subcultures reject the dominant culture. Some street clothing is based on the use of prestigious fashion labels, such as Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Moschino, Versace and Armarni.’
‘In the early 1980’s, British ‘Casuals’ were devoted to expensive labels which were changed continually in order that rival factions might ‘out cool’ each other.’
John Clarke, The Creation of Style: Leisure and the Working Class
My story doesn’t stop at class and consumption, on this journey, I will be looking at production and globalization, mapping and social exclusion, mobility and immobility, economic, social, educational, and symbolic capital, local and global hierarchy, gender, thrift, ‘lifestyle’ shopping, and the allure of craft, but we start with the very first Burberry store which opened in the Hampshire town of Basingstoke in 1856.
Thomas Burberry’s second store in Basingstoke circa 1870.
A Short History of ‘Lifestyle’ Shopping: Rural and Urban, Male and Female
The first Burberry store opened in the mid-nineteenth century by 21 year old tailors apprentice and budding entrepreneur Thomas Burberry. The store sold a jumbled range of products including fire damaged stock that Burberry piled high and sold cheap alongside women’s, men’s and children’s wear, home wares and corsetry. It also offered legal services and a funeral emporium. But its best and most famous line of goods were the waxed cotton farmers’ smocks it sold to its rural clientele.
In a sense, the shop at Basingstoke was more like a community resource, and reflected the times when the local shop was many things to many people: it was a rural store catering to the needs of its community. But I would argue that the first store also resembled many contemporary retail outlets that have moved away from selling commodities and now sell the idea of ‘lifestyle’, an idea that the early mail order catalogues had started to push, particularly in the US.
Although in its infancy, catalogue shopping was already becoming popular. First out of the starting gate was US based Sears, Roebuck and Co in 1886, closely followed by Kays of Worcester in 1890 and Freemans in London in 1905. Chicago based Sears, Roebuck and Co aimed their wares at the 65% of the US population who lived in rural areas, taking advantage of the newly built railroads. Their empire started slowly selling lumber and coal, then watches and jewellery.
Their business grew exponentially thanks to the farmers in rural America who sold their crops for cash, then bought what they needed from rural general stores. But the farmers had become increasingly frustrated at the huge mark-up charged by the stores, sometimes as much as 100% between the wholesale and retail price. Farmers formed protest movements to do battle against the high prices, and Sears, Roebuck and Co, and other mail-order companies stepped in to assist the farmers. Because Sears bought stock in volume, and were able to transport goods cheaply on the railroads, and thanks to the Post Office and free rural delivery and parcel post, they offered a happy alternative to the high-priced rural stores. Years later the company adopted the motto ‘Shop at Sears and Save’. Sears prospered.
In the US, the Sears, Roebuck and Co catalogue was held aloft next to the bible, often becoming only the second book in many households. This catalogue offered shoes, women’s garments and millinery, wagons, fishing tackle, stoves, furniture, china, musical instruments, saddles, firearms, buggies, bicycles, baby carriages and glassware. Sears in particular brought new innovations to millions of people – they were the first retailers with ‘talking machines’ – wind up gramophones, and later on introduced cameras, hi-fi and televisions. But their greatest achievement to lifestyle living had to be their ready to assemble houses that arrived on the railroad in packs. Sold as ‘Sears Modern Homes’ over 70,000 of these were sold in North America between 1908 and 1940. Sears helped popularize the latest technology available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century. Central heating, indoor plumbing and electricity were all new developments that ‘Modern Homes’ incorporated. You could buy wallpaper, kitchen cupboards, and even trees for the garden from the selection in the catalogue. The Sears lifestyle was complete.
In the UK, Kays of Worcester started selling watches and jewellery before expanding their line to cover pretty much everything for the home, clothing, toys, gardening tools – if it wasn’t perishable, Kays sold it. The big difference between the US and the UK selling model was that the UK companies used agents – usually the most trusted woman in the area, who knew her neighbours and who could and couldn’t afford the weekly re-payments. They were custodians of the catalogue, and drummed up trade with their neighbours, friends and families. If Sears was the champion of rural farmers, Kays and Littlewoods aimed their sights on urban women.
UK agents rewarded women for selling the most goods, and there was fierce competition between catalogue reps. In Daniel Miller’s ‘A Theory of Shopping’ he finds that ‘thrift’ is a key value that underpins the way women understand their shopping practices, and this characteristic was exploited to its maximum potential by Kays and Freemans and the other catalogues, who offered a viable alternative to the tallymen, who offered quick cash on the doorstep for exorbitant interest rates.
One of the key skills of the catalogue reps was to identify and assess extenuating circumstances for any of her clients – sudden job loss, a death in the family, and this assessment could only be done by someone with local knowledge, and someone who was trusted locally. In Nigel Thrift’s Movement Space (2005) he argues that the use of coding limits our chances of negotiation, and so the catalogue reps in their true sense of catalogue custodians and arbiters of local fiscal behaviour have been phased out in favour of Credit Reference Agencies, who since the 1980’s, score people remotely hundreds of miles away on the basis of a credit profile. Having a ‘credit profile’ always means having personal debt. This remote service has removed the possibility of making an account of ourselves, as it is now automated and impersonal.
Many women prospered with their success as a catalogue rep, and found they had a great deal of skill at selling, however the industry was still male dominated, as this quote from the official Littlewoods website shows [Littlewoods now co-owns Kays, Marshall Ward, Additions and Great Universal]
“There have been dramatic changes in almost every aspect of family life over the past three generations but, 60 years ago, when the social revolution was restlessly stirring, conditions were ripe for change. An analysis of Littlewoods’ mail order catalogues over that entire period shows just how significant those changes have been”’, said social historian Denis Frost, “Today’s average housewife and mother spends only three hours a day cooking and doing the housework. That would have been unthinkable for her counterpart in the early 1930s, who was no more than a slave to the housework. Without a doubt, the advent of home shopping has made an impressive contribution to the social revolution for women”.’
John Moores, founder of Littlewoods home shopping became known as the ‘Housewives’ Saviour’, and little was made about the largely female workforce that supported the whole industry.
What is interesting is that Burberry played little part in the catalogue evolution, yet during its years in the fashion doldrums, it was acquired by the Great Universal Stores and became label mates with Argos, Homebase, Kays Catalogue and Experian, the credit reference agency based in Nottingham.
Mobility, Mapping and Terrains
On my way to a re-union that marked a year since the Burberry factory in Treorchy was closed in March 2007, the trains I travelled on from London’s Paddington to the Rhondda Valley got steadily more utilitarian, until I found myself on a train that had ‘No Alcohol!’ signs pasted where I would normally expect to see adverts. It was raining hard, and out of the dirty carriage window I could see a river flowing very fast, but in place of sparkling water and riverside vegetation, there were just piles and piles of rubbish strewn over the riverbank, in the water, and caught up in the chain link fence in a way that I have only ever seen at Local Authority refuse tips. This was a neglected area of Britain.
After Pontypridd, the route into Treorchy narrows to a single line track, constricting the physical mobility of the towns’ inhabitants, but which also seems to have immobilized them in other ways. This once hard working, but never beautiful town was shattered by the loss of the coal mines in the 1980’s and is now reeling from the loss of its sole manufacturing base.
There was some cheer when a new Asda opened just after the Burberry closure, and the store employed a handful of the laid-off workers, but the town could not sustain Asda’s profit expectations and so many of the newly employed workers were again made redundant. The town just wasn’t buying sufficient groceries, and it is this crushing economic reality that has plunged the town and its people downwards.
The day after the reunion, Joan Young, a GMB Shop Steward and former machinist at Burberry, showed me round the town in her little car. It was still raining, so our chance to look at some of the sights was somewhat hampered – we had to roll down the passenger window as we approached a significant spot, and roll it up again swiftly afterwards, but it was important to Joan that I saw these sites. Joan showed me where they had set off on the last day of the factory, where they stopped en route, told me who was present, what banner they carried, who spoke to the television crews, what they said, which building they went to for a last ditch public meeting, what that building meant to her and the town. Her stories went on and on, as she breathed life into the streets and homes and businesses of this small Welsh town. Joan felt herself to be an ordinary and quite shy person, yet her exhaustive commentary suggested otherwise. This monumental struggle has taken over her life, and the re-telling of her stories about the GMB, the factory, her ex-colleagues, suggests that this narrative may never be fully put to rest.
In John Clarke’s writing about skinhead culture in 1970’s Britain, he talks about the ‘magical’ recovery of a community, but despite the desire from skinheads to recapture their sense of a working class local community, this did not happen. There are many parallels between the skinheads’ wish to work locally and manually in the face of post-industrialization: many of the Burberry workforce in Treorchy lived next door to the factory, and none lived more than two miles away. The Burberry workforce and the skinheads’ key concerns were always connected to ‘territory’ and ‘solidarity’, and as John Clarke argues they were
‘…derived from the traditional content of the working class community – the example, par excellence, of the defensively organised collective.’
John Clarke ‘The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community’, Resistance through Rituals
Although skinheads largely used their ‘parent’ culture in order to create this sense of community, the Burberry workforce used its union representation to form a cohesive body, and it was unionization, via the GMB, that gave many workers a feeling of belonging: they are represented, their thoughts and wishes have a witness. This was their form of a ‘defensively organized community’ – the female workforce against the giant Burberry - that ran in parallel to their working class status.
Clarke argues that the skinheads faced dispossession and a bleak future where the recreation of a ‘magical’ community was also an imaginary one. Similarly, the situation in Treorchy makes me feel concerned for its residents and ex-Burberry employees. The Burberry factory is being kept artificially ‘alive’ as they have £1.6 million trust fund and legacy to plan for, so the conversations still flow. The Board of Trustees appointed to make decisions about the trust fund comprises three shop stewards – including Joan Young, and two representatives from the GMB. What was clear was that while they were fighting for their jobs in direct opposition to the wishes of Burberry, was that this action had led the Treorchy workforce to become politicised.
From Burberry’s view point, we might look at Maliq Simone’s suggestion that we sometimes need to ‘take things into account’. In Burberry’s case we need to examine turnover and profit. Burberry clearly thought “we’re not making enough money in Treorchy, we’ll move production to China” justifying their decision via economic responsibilities to their shareholders. This of course only looks at one piece of a much larger picture, but it strikes at intention - they were trying to fit the closure of the Treorchy plant into an established framework of narratives (profit and loss, workforce structure, speed of production etc) to minimise disruption. Narratives have potential to go on and on, so to ‘take something into account’ has a way of minimising the number of questions and answers, and of ending the narrative.
That the narrative didn’t end there was an enormous shock to Burberry, who, forced by the negative publicity and celebrity endorsement of the workers’ struggle, found themselves at the wrong end of the flow of power. This wrong move cost Burberry dearly – over £3 million after the trust fund had been agreed and redundancy payments secured. The power relationship had been reversed.
It remains to be seen how Burberry ‘manage’ the next stage of their development, as there is already mounting criticism of their decision to leave the Rhondda Valley, as this piece about Burberry shows
‘The big challenge for the next few years will not be whether a D-list celebrity has got hold of your clothes, but whether consumers will stomach the poorly-paid worker churning out ever more expensive ‘things’ that are supposed to remind us of a more gentle bygone age, all in the pursuit of that all-important bottom line.’
Liz Jones, Daily Mail, 2 June 2008
If the Daily Mail, not known for its liberal stance towards the working class, has decided to publish a page long article about a luxury fashion brand and the implications of sweated labour, then there has indeed been an attempt at shifting national attitudes.
Walter Benjamin argues that simultaneously different regimes with flexibility in work practices and a lack of a fixed position is the ideal state. Businesses may expand or contract over time, and spatial relationships always need to be revised using different ‘anchorages’ – informal and formal, jobs, skills, people, and this may be the way forward for Treorchy and many other town and cities who find themselves in a transitional situation.
In Kathleen Stewart’s book ‘A Space on the Side of the Road’, she asks the question: “Why does mapping stop in the hills of Appalachia?” This area is now the poorest in the US, the coal mining industry has long since closed down, and most families now live on welfare. Stewart asked residents to map the area they live in, but what she was given were stories about barely functioning car batteries and trips to the old car they found the battery in, and then what they did with the battery - what she terms ‘fabulation’ where one story leads to another and it is not clear what is being mapped. The hills are dead, but the residents keep sifting through the remnants. How do those who continue to live there put some life into the space? One answer is to put themselves into the space to try and see things in a different way – literally mapping to represent a space for themselves.
To some extent, the inhabitants of the Appalachian mountains are the excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy, and show a fragmented and betrayed community with many parallels to Treorchy and the Rhondda Valley.
Fashion Leadership
In a fragmented market of consumer choice, how do we choose what to wear, and why choose Burberry? The image of Burberry is still highly polarized in the UK, between those who feel they are part of the brand, and those who are on the outside. Judith Williamson argues that customers do not choose in the shop, but in response to the advertisement, by ‘recognizing’ themselves as the kind of person who’ll use a specific brand.
‘But the more subtle level on which the advertisement works is that of ‘alreadyness’, which is where ‘totemism’ becomes part of ideology: you do not simply buy the product in order to become part of the group it represents; you must feel that you already belong to the group and therefore you will buy it.’
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, Chapter Two: Signs Address Somebody
Conversely, many people ‘recognize’ themselves in some of the lurid headlines that surround Burberry and some other luxury fashion brands including Aquascutum as this clipping from the Leicester Mercury illustrates:
‘Pub-goers face ‘Burberry’ ban’
‘Two Leicester pubs have banned drinkers wearing several brands of designer clothing to crack down on violence. The Parody and Varsity have introduced strict clothing rules and banned brands including Stone Island, Aquascutum, Henri Lloyd and Burberry. The pubs have teamed up with police to compile a list of clothing they believe are worn by groups of youths and football hooligans. The policy, aimed at “hard core trouble makers”, was introduced on 10 August.’
Caroline Nodder, spokeswoman for Barracuda, the company which owns Varsity and The Parody, told the Leicester Mercury: “This is not necessarily aimed at football violence. It is targeting a certain gang of lads that have been causing concern in the area, but if it works to exclude the football element, then so much the better.”
PC Karen Holdridge, from the city centre’s violence and disorder team, said the policy was aimed at tackling a hard core of troublemakers. She said: “Well-known football hooligans have a particular dress code. These people are recognized as coming into the city centre day in, day out and causing trouble.”
A spokesman for Henri Lloyd called the ban a “ridiculous prejudice”. He said: “To stereotype and prejudice customers based on their choice of clothing seems ridiculous.”
‘A Burberry spokeswoman said: “It’s a very aspirational, cross-generational, cross-gender brand and with regard to the Leicester issue, it’s clearly a localised issue and to be honest it’s actually quite insignificant in the face of the brand’s global appeal”’
Leicester Mercury, 20 August 2004
Although Burberry isn’t the only luxury brand to be singled out, it is the one in the spotlight and gets the biggest kicking from the media. Though the Burberry spokeswoman doesn’t actually speak out against the Leicester trouble makers, she tries to minimize their impact by contrasting what she sees as a petty local incident against the power of company worldwide. I imagine that the company was secretly terrified of the consequences of having this type of press coverage.
The Burberry brand is as polarized as it is possible to be, and the fight against ‘unsuitable’ clients goes on, as in this recent press about their eye-wateringly expensive Warrior handbag. A headline in the Times reads
‘£11,000 bags help Burberry ditch chavs’
Steven Hawkes, The Times, 28 May 2008
The company are fighting back using price as a repellant to customers that they feel have no business buying their brand. In the era of the ‘credit crunch’ when all but the most wealthy are feeling the pinch, Burberry chooses to launch an £11,000 handbag,
In the same week, Liz Jones in the Daily Mail reports
‘It’s a luxury brand with a chequered past. But now Burberry has shaken off its chav image – and is the fashionistas’ favourite once more.’
Liz Jones, Fashion Addict: Daily Mail, 2 June 2008
Jones’ piece shows the image of Daniella Westbrook, ex-East Enders actor and former cocaine addict, with her daughter dressed head to toe in the Burberry Nova check – the same image used in the press to sound the death knell of the brand some years ago. The Westbrook image has become a visual short-cut to illustrate all that is ‘bad’ when someone consumes the brand in the ‘wrong’ way.
There is still a groundswell of interest in, repulsion to and fear of the chav lifestyle, a ubiquitous demonising tag that shortcuts descriptions of ASBO branded teens, early parenthood, out of control social behaviour, poor educational attainment and worklessness. This lack of educational capital is associated with a perceived lack of legitimate cultural capital which is central to the way in which working class consumption of Burberry is stigmatized.
In the late 1990’s, Burberry used model Kate Moss, then the face of ‘heroin chic’, to front a new advertising campaign. This iconic image of Moss wearing a Nova check bikini and bridal veil became one of the images of the Cool Britannia era, but crucially the image marks the point at which Burberry moved away from its fusty image and became an aspirational brand. Moss has always been identified as working class, and I think that this was a signal to other working class consumers that it was OK to want this particular luxury brand. There have been many well documented drawbacks, including this piece of analysis in the Times:
‘The clever but naïve idea to print a few affordable Burberry headscarves and bikinis to rid itself of its stuffy image turned into a highly contagious virus.’
Alice Olins, Analysis, The Times 29 May 2008
The language in the article is highly loaded and demeaning – calling customers who bought the ‘affordable’ merchandize a viral infection. What is rarely discussed is how working class consumption has turned the brand around, popularized it amongst younger people, and inverted Veblen’s ‘trickle down’ theory. John Clarke and Dick Hebdige in their writing about Mods and other street styles, show similar parallels in this inversion:
‘As some street styles draw from fashion, luxury and industrial fashion ‘borrow’ ideas from street styles.’
‘Stylistic innovation often begins outside the mainstream, among minorities and categories of people who are perceived and who perceive themselves as marginal to the dominant culture.’
‘If the style shows signs of becoming popular, large firms begin to produce their versions of it and market them aggressively.’
John Clarke, The Creation of Style: Leisure and the Working Class
As the last quote shows us, it is not the working class consumption of a luxury brand that is ‘at fault’ per se, but its popularity. As soon as something catches the public imagination, then manufacturers – including Burberry themselves – will manufacture more of the same. So it was with the Nova check, but what the company failed to see at the time was how this design was being consumed.
In Dick Hebdige’s ‘The Meaning of Mod’ he examines
‘…..the way objects and things were borrowed by the Mods from the world of consumer commodities, and their meaning transformed by the way they were worked into a new ensemble. This involved expropriating the meanings given to things by the dominant consumer culture, and incorporating them in ways which expressed sub-cultural rather than dominant values’.
so the style the Mods created
‘….constituted a parody of consumer society in which they were situated. The Mod dealt his blows by inverting and distorting the images (of neatness, of short hair) so cherished by his employers and parents, to create a style, which while being overtly close to the straight world was nonetheless incomprehensible to it.’
By using a brand like Burberry, imbued with 150 years of British history and tradition, working class consumption of it was deeply troubling to the company. Fifty years earlier, the tailors of Saville Row took out a full page article in the Daily Sketch denouncing the Teds appropriation of the Edwardian suit designed for ‘young men about town’. The tailors were furious that something they had put together to entice new clients to Saville Row, and then keep them there for life, was being ruined by an altogether more unruly group of low paid men. The difference this time is that Burberry would never have been able to be so public about their disapproval, for fear of unleashing public criticism and possibly damaging their balance sheet.
I have been visiting www.reviewcentre.com, a fashion bulletin board for a few years, and find this quote written by Legs from Leeds clearly illustrates issues about economic, cultural, educational and symbolic capital, and class differentiation in a way that I have not seen or heard elsewhere. I feel certain that Legs from Leeds would not be Burberry’s idea of a dream customer, yet she is overwhelmingly loyal to the brand.
By legs from leeds on 1st Sep 2004
User Ratings
Goods purchased & cost
Overcoat £500, duffle £595, watch £250
Quality of service
10/10
Layout of shop
10/10
Value for money
10/10
Overall rating
10/10
Recommended
Yes
Good Points
Burberry is the best
Bad Points
Expensive not many stockists in leeds
General Comments
I love Burberry you can’t beat it for style and class when I’m out with my mum and two grandsons and we are all wearing burberry that’s a head turner some people snigger but that’s usually the clampets that can’t afford Burberry I have socks shoes 2 overcoats 2 dufflecoats trousers jeans T-shirts, blouses, belts, hats, scarfs, gloves, sunglasses, 5 bags, purse, 4 keyrings and a watch so I know what im talking about Burberry real class we travel far and wide for ours.
The Review Centre bulletin board gives opposing views a space in which to debate the rights and wrongs of their arguments, so this comment from an online user named Old Fart appeared a few months later.
Comment by oldfart on 31st Dec 2004
‘I have a very nice Burberry trenchcoat which I bought from Burberry’s in Regent Street about 15 years ago to replace the one that got pinched while I was having dinner at the House of Commons. Just goes to show that you couldn’t trust anyone even then. I’m very fond of that trenchcoat and it’s still in excellent condition. I had no idea that Burberry had such a huge following these days. People used to buy their products because they were of very high quality, i think even HMQ used to wear a Burberry headscarf on occasion. It would appear that today people buy Burberry for reasons of fashion, which usually results in the quality of the product coming down. There are so many good quality clothes out there, why bother to drape the entire family from head to foot in Burberry. You are inviting opinions so, to be quite frank, I think it’s a bit of a tacky thing to do. You might have a bit of money but you may not have any taste or style.’
Legs from Leeds comes back to him a few days later with this vociferous comment.
Comment by legs on 4th Jan 2005
‘We are a working class family who happen to love burberry. We are not rich but I don’t drink, gamble or smoke. My vice is burberry. I dont want my grandsons to look like most other kids walking round in a pair of tracky bottoms and a football shirt. I have taste and my grandsons have style. We don’t wear it as a fashion thing. As you stated in your review you bought a trench coat 15 years ago, I’ve just bought a black trenchcoat. Fashion lasts 6 months not 15 years.’
Legs clearly feels strongly about the brand, strong enough to compel her to write a review about it, and, having posted it, prompted her to re-visit the site and respond to visitor comments. What interested me is Legs’ statement that she doesn’t ‘drink, gamble or smoke’ - Legs is interested in constructing herself as someone responsible with money, rejecting the female stereotype as a ‘spendaholic’, easily seduced by adverts, gullible and out-of-control with her spending. Clearly, Burberry is not a budget brand, so Legs needs to assert herself against accusations of profligacy. In doing this, she also distances herself from the ‘feckless’ working class associated with ‘chavs’.
What is implicit in almost all the reviews on the bulletin board is a sense of misplacement, particularly when the working classes are thought to be consuming the ‘wrong’ things, or consuming them in the ‘wrong’ way. After his insidious remarks about the House of Commons and HMQ, Oldfart is clearly trying to ‘outrank’ Legs. He seems to feel that she has overstepped the mark and is buying into something that really she has no business owning.
In Don Slater’s ‘Consumer Culture and Modernity’ (1999) he argues that
‘Taste and style are concepts which are at once intimately connected with consumer culture and also occupy a notoriously paradoxical position between the personal and the social. As Bourdieu’s classic contention that ‘taste classifies the classifier’ we read people’s consumer choices as moves within a game of class, prestige, status, hierarchy and fashionabilty.’
Oldfart sees himself as the ‘intellectual’ – the person able to make judgements on others, and he is clearly annoyed at Legs’ lack of cultural capital, but seems unable to articulate his frustration.
In Beverley Skeggs article ‘The Making of Class and Gender’ she articulates rather succinctly on behalf of Oldfart why he’s become so cross about Burberry being bought by the ‘wrong’ people.
‘Attributing negative value to the working class is a mechanism for attributing value to the middle-class self (such as making oneself tasteful through judging others to be tasteless). So, it is not just a matter of using some aspects of the culture of the working class to enhance one’s value, but also maintaining the position of judgement to attribute value, which assigns the other as immoral, repellent, abject, worthless, disgusting, even disposable.’
B Skeggs ‘The Making of Class and Gender’ (2005)
Skeggs concludes that all forms of capital are ‘context specific’ and that people are distributed in the overall social space according to the global quantity of the capital they possess, the composition of their capital, the relative weight of their overall capital, and finally, their trajectory in to social space.
B Skeggs, ‘Formations of Class and Gender’ 1997
Pierre Bourdieu sees culture as a source of domination, in which intellectuals occupy the key role as specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power, and perhaps this is where Oldfart places himself.
In Distinction, Bourdieu argues that taste, an acquired ‘cultural competence,’ is used to legitimise social differences, and that taste functions to make those social distinctions. Legs is unlikely to command much in the way of economic capital, and she is certainly seen by Oldfart to lack any cultural capital but, crucially, she distinguishes herself and her family from other residents in the area:
‘I don’t want my grandsons to look like most other kids walking round in a pair of tracky bottoms and a football shirt’
Legs may not possess legitimate forms of cultural capital, but she is aware of what is seen as legitimate taste. Legs’ problem appears to be that she has invested in a brand as a sign of taste, but has bought into a brand image created by the company. What she can’t cope with is the fact that the brand doesn’t have a fixed meaning – that what she thought clearly signified ‘good taste’ has been positioned in other ways.
Legs is seen to be dismissive of the way ‘most other kids’ in her neighbourhood dress which, by extension, is a criticism of the parents who fund most of the purchases, particularly for younger children. She’s set herself apart from others in her own ‘habitus’. Legs is aware that she’s created a look that attracts attention
‘…and we are all wearing Burberry, that’s a head turner’
Skeggs refers to a hierarchical element in Formations of Class and Gender and states that
‘The space for contestation over cultural and symbolic forms of capital occurs at local as well as national and global levels. The local is the site where de-legitimacy is resisted yet the ability to counteract the de-legitimation of their own cultural capital at a local level does not mean that already devalued capital can be capitalized upon. Rather it suggests momentary refusals of powerlessness. To challenge powerlessness does not mean that one automatically shifts into positions of power. It means, straightforwardly, that one is refusing to be powerless or be positioned without power.’
So Legs fights back to counter some of Oldfart’s remarks, and in order to assert herself in to a ‘better’ social position. She is also dismissive of those who are critical of her clothing choices:
‘some people snigger but that’s usually the clampets that can’t afford Burberry’
Legs doesn’t ignore the people laughing at her and her family, but places herself on what she sees as a higher level, pointing out that envy may be the main reason for their reactions.
What is interesting about the Burberry check is that it’s instantly recognizable – in the same way as the Chanel double CC, the Gucci repeat pattern and the Louis Vuitton LV logos. Angela Partington makes an interesting point in her chapter ‘Popular Fashion and Working Class Affluence’ (1992) that acknowledges this element of visibility:
‘There have been many explanations of fashion which acknowledge its role in the expression of class difference in a capitalist society, but they tend to see it as working automatically in the interests of dominant or privileged groups. Middle-class affluence, and ‘conspicuous consumption’, are seen as a means of exclusion – dis-identification with other groups; whereas working class affluence is seen as a means of emulation – identification with other groups.’
Legs from Leeds and many others have chosen Burberry as a means of letting people know what they are wearing - quite literally ‘branding’ themselves. There’s no mistaking the Nova check, and in the absence of any fashion leadership, Burberry fulfils an important role as it represents a kind of ‘instant’ cultural currency, but it also sends a sign to other wearers that they are part of a larger group. The boys from the Pupil Referral Unit knew this, and it formed a distinctive part of their identity.
Partington asserts that rather than making the preservation of ‘distinction’ the prerogative of elite or privileged groups, mass production has made it easier for ‘subordinate’ groups to have their own means of exclusion. Legs from Leeds is part of an elite group, but only at a local level, as she attempts to create her own element of exclusivity. She has bought wholesale into the brand, owning thousands of pounds worth of clothing and accessories, as if buying the brand on a grand scale will help to legitimize her, after which she’ll be able to ‘cash in’ her cultural capital.
Legs’ detractors, including Old Fart, might be interested in the Foucauldian idea of doing the ‘wrong’ thing, without actually breaking any criminal laws, and how this relates to judging the criminal by his soul.
‘During the 150 or 200 years that Europe has been setting up its new penal system, the judges have gradually, by means of a process that goes back very far indeed, taken to judging something other than crimes, namely the ‘soul’ of the criminal.’
‘And, by that very fact, they have begun to do something other than pass judgment. Or, to be more precise, within the very judician modality of judgment, other types of assessment have slipped in, profoundly altering its rules of elaboration.’
So we see from Foucault that the idea of ‘civilising’ and containing the working classes goes back a long way in history, and continues to gather pace today.
What and Who Counts in Marketing?
Burberry has been very astute in marketing terms over their 150 years of trading, and marketing has played an important and pivotal role in the development of the company. In 1891 T Burberry & Sons opened their first London store, at 30 Haymarket, then and now a fashionable address in the centre of the west end. The Burberry profile rocketed, as did some of its major competitors – primarily Aquascutum, who hotly disputed Burberry’s claim to be the first to invent and sell waterproof clothing. Burberry seized the moment when officers informally adopted the ‘Tielocken’ coat (a forerunner of the Trench coat) during the Boer war in about 1895, and they also got busy at the patent office, copyrighting many of their fabrics and clothing designs – even their Tielocken gaiters.
At the start of the 20th Century Burberry began to use ‘celebrity’ figures including Captain Roald Amundsen in 1911. The Norwegian explorer had conquered the South Pole leaving behind tents supplied to him by Burberry as a message to Captain Scott that he had reached the pole before him. Burberry also supplied tents and clothing to Sir Ernest Shackleton on his trip to the Antarctic in 1914, and provided outfits for Alcock & Brown on their historic flight over the Atlantic in 1919.
This quote comes from the Burberry archive which is situated at their headquarters building in Haymarket, site of their first London store.
‘Captain Sir John Alcock, D.S.C, the first airman to fly the Atlantic, reported as follows regarding his Burberry kit:
“I am writing to tell you how very satisfactory the outfit has proved which I ordered for the Atlantic flight. Although in continual mist, rain or sleet, and the altitude varying from 200 to 11,000 feet causing great variations of temperature, I kept as dry as possible under such conditions.’
‘This was a wonderful achievement even for Burberrys, especially considering that I never adopted any electrical or other artificial means of heating, and that no rubber or cement is used in your waterproofing.”
J Alcock’
Although this now looks outdated and clunky, at the time it was dynamite. Alcock and Brown were two of the most famous men in the world, so to persuade them to talk about the brand was quite a coup. As both aviators were British, this added an extra frisson of pride.
It is this aspect of Britishness that Burberry now trades on. In the past it has traded on its innovation – the waterproof gabardine Macintosh, the Trench Coat, the Tielocken suits. This afforded the company numerous Queens Awards for Industry however the last award was in the 1970’s. As the number of British production plants is dwindling, it needs to conjour up an image of what the world thinks British might be, as this piece of copy about the Autumn Winter 07 collections from the Burberry website shows:
‘“The British medieval mood of the show was the starting point to this campaign, where our British models Agyness, Lily, Keira and Georgia, meet today’s young talented British musicians against a backdrop of iconic argyle and Prorsum horse motif wallpaper”’ said Christopher Bailey.
‘The Burberry Autumn Winter 07 ad campaign is created in signature black and white and has a typically extensive British cast. The edgy pictures, photographed by Mario Testino, are well suited to the rock-inspired spirit of the Burberry campaign, which also features members of modern bands such as the Paddingtons, The View and Lamkin Love (sic) and singer songwriter Patrick Wolf.’
‘British models Agyness Deyn, Lily Donaldson, Keira Gormley and Georgia Frost have been chosen to front Burberry’s new Autumn Winter advertising campaign. Both Agyness and Lily were featured on the cover of American Vogue as two of the influential magazine’s 10 most promising models of the year. They have both appeared previously in Burberry campaigns and on the Burberry Prorsum runway shows.’
‘The newest addition to the Burberry collection is the studded ‘Knight bag’ made of soft nappa leather. The key ready-to-wear pieces are shoes, outerwear and dresses.’
July 2007 for the Autumn / Winter collections 2007-08
Burberry is very pointed about the use of British models as most catwalk shows and editorial shoots are now dominated by models from Eastern Europe, however it is the well heeled Russians who will buy most of the 300,000 pairs of £300 shoes sold this season.
Other aspects of Burberry’s marketing strategy hark back to earlier times, some back to the dawn of advertising itself. Their London stores are largely ‘heritage’ buildings in Bond Street, Knightsbridge, and Haymarket, however most of Burberry’s international stores are gleaming edifices with an eye on modernist and contemporary architecture. The image below shows the Burberry store at Macau airport, and this is not untypical of the style of store they also favour in North America and Japan, but which sends out very mixed messages of high end glamour, human labour, gender bias and invisibility.
In Anne McClintock’s ‘Imperial Leather’, she talks about the very early forms of advertising, the exhibition, and display of commodities, with particular attention to the polished environment, free of the imprint of human hands and labour, the displays were seen as inextricably linked to women.
The highly polished and mirror like Burberry store at Macau Airport
It is easy to imagine a female cleaner behind the scenes keeping this shop clean and clear of fingerprints and smudges on a daily basis; the most poorly paid employee of the store, yet the one who carries the hopes and dreams of the entire marketing team. When McClintock writes about the ‘mirroring’ image, she does so in the context of the ‘Monkey Brand’ soap advert of the Victorian era, which shows a monkey always carrying either a shiny frying pan or a mirror:
‘The mirror / frying pan, like all fetishes, visibly expresses a crises in value but cannot resolve it. It can only embody a contradiction, frozen as commodity spectacle, luring the spectator deeper and deeper into consumerism.’
A McClintock, Imperial Leather (1995)
This must be exactly the effect Burberry had in mind when designing their stores, yet it is strange to think that these ideas are far from new, and far from innovative, yet strangely compelling.
It is interesting that the ‘heritage’ images so connected to the Burberry brand have been shown in different ways – via the cobbled Mews road, the black cab, the belted Trench coat and the London skyline. McClintock shows us how the semiotic space around many of these iconic images has been arrived at, but also how they have evolved with the advent of consumerism. In ‘Soft Soaping Empire’, she takes us back to the impact of the World Fairs towards the end of the 19th Century
‘By exhibiting commodities not only as goods, but as an organised system of images, the World Exhibition helped fashion a new kind of being, the consumer, and a new kind of ideology, consumerism. The mass consumption of the commodity spectacle was born.’
National Fairs had existed since the end of the 18th Century, and are documented in Walter Benjamin’s wonderful and poetic ‘Arcades Project’:
‘The world exhibitions are preceded by national exhibitions of industry, the first of which takes place in the Champs de Mars in 1798. It arises from a wish to entertain the working classes, and then becomes a festival of emancipation. The worker occupies the foreground, as customer. The framework of the entertainment industry has not yet taken shape; the popular festival provides this.’
It took the UK until the mid-19th Century during the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1881, for the working classes to be seen as potential consumers, yet the advertising of that period did not reflect this. The 19th Century adverts did not reference the very people who used the products – mainly soaps and cleaning products, and the adverts were aimed at middle class women, yet she was seldom involved in domestic labour.
McClintock states that:
‘Before 1851, advertising had scarcely existed. As a commercial form, it was generally regarded as a confession of weakness, a rather shabby last resort.’
One person who changed the way advertising was seen was the new managing director of the Pears Soap company. Thomas J Barratt, a brother-in-law of one of the original family owners, bought the Milais painting ‘A Child’s World’ in the mid-1880s and subsequently changed its title to ‘Bubbles’; this revolutionized the way people saw advertising.
‘In advertising, the axis of the possession is shifted to the axis of the spectacle. Advertising’s chief contribution to modernity was the discovery that by manipulating the semiotic space around the commodity, the unconscious as a public space could also be manipulated. Barratt’s great innovation was to invest huge sums of money in the creation of a visible space around the commodity.’
A McClintock, Imperial Leather (1995)
Burberry have worked hard over the past eleven years (since the arrival of American Chief Executive Officer Anne Marie Bravo, and subsequently fellow American Angela Arhends) to maintain and enhance the semiotic space around their commodities, particularly through advertising where they have invested heavily in British ‘celebrity’ models including Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, Agyness Deyn, Penelope Tree, indie band Kasabian, as well as the offspring of Bryan Ferry (and Ferry himself), David Bailey, Richard Branson and Jeremy Irons. They constantly need to redress an imbalance caused by a lack of domestic production and a potential loss of British cachet, history and tradition by using people identified with particular creative industries within the UK.
Burberry operates globally in both production and retail, and as we have already seen, its decision to close the Treorchy production plant has proved a testing time for the company. In Judith Williamson’s excellent and enduring ‘Decoding Advertisements’ first published in 1978, she shows us that the situation in Treorchy is in fact an old story:
‘Branding and logos seem to be everywhere, and business is increasingly global: companies operating across continents become harder to pin down under national legislation, and a trend towards sub-contracted labour releases corporate employers from responsibility towards their workforce, which can be treated as expendable.’
The Treorchy plant wasn’t losing money, but Burberry took the decision to switch production to a site in China, where they could lower the unit cost for each and every garment it produced. Despite deserting the Welsh production plant, Burberry didn’t miss a marketing opportunity in autumn 2007, by producing a limited edition £50 ‘Fashion for Relief’ T-shirt emblazoned with a Union Jack, the proceeds of which went to UK flood victims.
The Allure of Craft
The Burberry archive at Chilcombe House in Winchester is home to a rich collection of artifacts – from classic Trench coats donated by people from all over the world, to diaries and texts written by local workers, detailing cutting and sewing instructions for ‘models’ they have worked on. One such diary belongs to a teenage seamstress working in Hampshire just after World War l. It is written by Miss A Attwood in 1919, and gives us an insight into how these often very intricate garments were made. Sometimes Miss Attwood has special orders – a Mr Keynes appears on the first page of her diary – with an order for a Square Cut overcoat from a pattern produced in 1890 – so was the vintage look popular then, or was Mr Keynes an elderly man with conservative tastes? What the diaries don’t tell us is what the working conditions were like - did workers become friends and were they allowed to talk, how long was a typical working day, was there sufficient daylight to sew by - and it is tempting now to gloss over the fact that, then as now, the largely female workforce was probably paid a minimum wage.
In Alison Goodrum’s ‘The National Fabric’, she explores how we often look back from a contemporary perspective and dream wistfully of a simpler time:
‘Simnel’s model of elite fashion, embodying skilled craft production versus constructed images that pastiche a folksy past that often romanticize the daily life from which all trace of oppressive social relations may be erased.’
Goodrum points out that there is an industry connected to this ‘other’ life of an archive, and shops like Past Times with its nationwide network of retail outlets cash in not only with tourist pounds, but with homegrown customers.
‘…tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as an image, a simulacrum or pastiche (imitation communities constructed to evoke images of some folksy past) …….At best, historical tradition is reorganized as a museum culture…of local production, of how things were once made, sold, consumed and integrated into a long-lost and often romanticized daily life.’
Goodrum points to some ‘comfort’ factors to support our continuing our love affair with the past, and cites Matthew De Bord’s 1997 study of North American mail order clothing company, J Crew:
‘However, the J Crew example, with its deeply nostalgic references to the family unit and robust living also reveals another important strand to the changing face of the globalizing market place, namely how the disorientation said to characterize global times has given rise to a reactionary search for stability and the pursuit of a palpable sense of identity. In consequence, the niche marketing of fashionable lifestyle brands is one mechanism that has tapped into a consumer longing for placed identities for placeless times.’
‘Thus we see that the instabilities affiliated to globalization have, in extension, generated feelings of insecurity and vulnerability, and that the folksy look with its signposts to a bygone age, craft production and homespun charm is being actively employed to offset this apparent global rootlessness.’
Peter Braham argues in ‘Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production’ (1997) that
‘…..a number of distinct epochs, defined by their techniques of production and consumption, may be charted across the entire history of fashion. Beginning with Simnel’s [1904] depiction of a Parisian-based model of élite fashion with its highly skilled craft production methods.
Will we look back on this era of cut price mass produced clothes, knock off designs, counterfeit goods, and £11,000 handbags with any nostalgia? How do Burberry’s conservative designs fit into an image of the UK, and London in particular, being one of the style capitals of the world? Burberry has taken a battering from the critics over the years, but ultimately, it will win in pure economics.
Bibliography
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P Braham, ‘Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production’ Sage (London and New Delhi) 1997
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M. DeBord, ‘Texture and Taboo: The Tyranny of Texture and Ease in the J Crew Catalogue’, The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, Berg Publications, Volume 1, No.3 pp 261 – 278, August 1997
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