Burberry AW26 and the reignition of London’s cultural power

After months of murmured obituaries for London Fashion Week, AW26 felt like a correction. The city did not just rehabilitate its reputation, its stormed in and assurted it. At the centre of that resurgence was Burberry, staging not just a show, but a thesis on London’s cultural primacy, one that stretched from its grand institutions to its current explosive underground scene.

For AW26, Daniel Lee pulled Burberry away from the pastoral escapism of recent seasons and dropped it back into the metropole. Gone was the English countryside. In its place: a wet, wind-lashed reconstruction of London Bridge. Not the kind you see on postcards, but the real thing, grey and slick with rain and grit. The runway floor reflected puddles like freshly soaked pavement, the bridge looming in the background as both landmark and metaphor.

Anyone who has actually crossed London Bridge knows the choreography it demands. Dodging tourists, pushing against winds and rain. Moving with speed and gliding through tourists as. There is a specific strut required to survive it, and Lee presented this with pride as a focal point for the showcase. Burberry does not seek shelter from the storm. It opens the umbrella and enjoys a brisk stroll in it.

That pragmatism ran through the clothes. Bomber jackets, furs, textured leathers and puffers worn with the London underground map worn proudly on the chest. Trench coats thrown over silk slips felt less like styling and more like muscle memory, a uniform honed by decades of navigating night buses and afterparties.

Crucially, the collection redirected the gaze back to London as a cultural engine rather than a nostalgic backdrop. The underground, long the city’s most exportable asset, pulsed beneath the surface of the show. London’s music scene is once again dictating global tempo, its aesthetics filtering from basements to billboards. That tension between polish and grit, heritage and subculture, is where the city has always thrived and where this collection located its power.

If AW25 and SS25 flirted with retreat, AW26 was a declaration. The discourse around London Fashion Week’s supposed demise has evaporated, replaced by a season that felt sharp, self-assured and globally resonant. Burberry crystallised this perfectly.