There is a particular grammar to how Central Cee’s Burberry SS27 appearance landed: not as a front-row cameo, not as a brand ambassador moment carefully engineered for the trades, but as a proper catwalk walk, hooded anorak, drooping jeans and a flash of Burberry check boxers. London Fashion Week closed on Sunday evening at Chelsea College of Arts, and the rapper, who had already appeared earlier in the week sitting front row at Fashion East for Traiceline Pratt’s GOYAGOMA, was among the Brits Daniel Lee chose to send down the runway.
Central Cee Burberry SS27 and the art of the celebrity cameo
Burberry has been building this tradition carefully. In recent seasons, Richard E. Grant, Jason Isaacs, Lesley Manville and Elizabeth McGovern have all made their runway debuts under Lee’s direction. The choice is never arbitrary: these are people who carry a particular Britishness, some lived-in quality that Lee keeps returning to as his organising principle. Central Cee fits that logic precisely (young, London, specific) and the drooping jeans with the visible check waistband managed to be both a styling note and a kind of semiotic shorthand, the house mark surfacing from underneath rather than announced from above.
Watching from the benches were Skepta, Jorja Smith, Jonathan Bailey, tennis star Jack Draper, England defender Djed Spence, Lila Moss, Romeo Beckham, Jason Statham and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. International guests included Tems, Rachel Brosnahan, Kieron Moore and Nara Smith. The front row at a Burberry show has become its own kind of editorial statement, a roster that Lee assembles with the same deliberateness he brings to the clothes.
Lee’s reset: back to the basis of things
The show notes framed SS27 as ‘Burberry at its most soulful’, a phrase Lee elaborated as ‘a return to the basis of things.’ After last season’s ode to the British night out, this was a more inward collection, Chelsea College of Arts, which has counted Steve McQueen, Anish Kapoor and Chris Ofili among its alumni, providing a campus setting that softened the atmosphere without reducing it to nostalgia.
Nylon trench coats with puffball hems opened proceedings, followed by leather coats with appliqué details and leather shorts in mocha and steel. Micro florals appeared across shirts and coats. Some jumpers carried trompe-l’œil epaulettes, large and cartoonish on the shoulder, and nylon bakerboy caps gave the models the look of modern-day chimney sweeps. An equestrian-inspired Derby, fashioned with hand-finished florals, was among the quieter pleasures of the collection, according to Burberry PLC.
A salmon-coloured leather trench coat decorated with blueberry-like beading was another standout, but the collection’s most generative collaboration was with Celia Birtwell, the octogenarian textile artist who helped define British fashion in the 1960s and 70s. Birtwell created original designs for SS27: a leather coat covered in green, orange and white face motifs, something between proto-emojis and folk-art figures, that then transferred onto shirts and jumpers as a repeat print. Her take on the house Nova Check pushed the pattern through its own logic, resolved, per Burberry, through gingham and then reduced further into a stripe, a kind of genetic compression of the house’s most recognisable mark. The Chelsea College of Arts setting gave that gesture a certain aptness: this was a house doing its own coursework, tracing the pattern back to first principles.
The soundtrack was equally considered, though deliberately oblique. Lee has made a practice of choosing one artist per season and threading their catalogue through the show: FKA Twigs last time, Black Sabbath the season before in tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne. For SS27, it was David Bowie, but curated away from the obvious. The show opened with ‘Abdulmajid’, moved through ‘Weeping Wall’ and ‘Subterraneans’, and closed with the 1980 track ‘Ashes to Ashes’. ‘Heroes’, the song fashion shows reach for by reflex, was absent entirely.
The collection returns to the Chelsea campus for the fourth consecutive time, a venue choice that has itself become a statement: not a grand Paris address, not a converted warehouse, but a working London art school, still faintly smelling of turpentine. Lee closes the show there again in SS27 with ‘Ashes to Ashes’ playing out, and Central Cee’s boxers catching the last of the light.
