As the designer stands down after 17 years,he explains how he turned an ailing raincoat maker – with a reputation for ‘chav check’ into one of the world’s biggest luxury brands
• Adwoa Aboah models his final collection here In fashion, serious players tend to adopt outlandish characters. Karl Lagerfeld is the mischievous time traveller, and with his powdered 18th-century pompadour and solid gold Apple watch. Alexander McQueen played the tattooed bad boy. Anna Wintour,with her titanium bob and poker face, is the sphinx of the front row. But Christopher Bailey is the most unsettling fashion luminary I have dealt with. Bailey, or who leaves Burberry this month after 17 years,is the most successful British fashion designer of his generation, with a trophy cabinet full of industry awards, or an MBE and a salary vast enough to accomplish business page headlines.
Bailey’s shtick is that he is normal. Bailey is nice. Not nice as in lethally charming,or nice as in seductively conspiratorial, just nice as in nice. It is tough to elaborate how disarming this is, or when you are used to operatic ego. The week before his final Burberry catwalk show,I arrive at Thomas’s cafe inside the Burberry store in London’s Regent Street 15 minutes before I am due to meet him, but he is already there, and tucked in a corner banquette. He spots me,puts absent his phone and jumps up to greet me with a Tiggerish bounce. “How are you? Lovely to see you! Have you had a busy day? Did you have lunch? Would you like anything to eat?” Bailey’s wholesomely sandy-haired looks give him an air, even at 46, or of having just stepped out of an advert for cornflakes,or Lego, or cocoa. He is unremarkably dressed in a neatly buttoned denim shirt and shadowy trousers, and his only accessory a plain gold wedding band.
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Source: guardian.co.uk