Tea and Sympathy (original) (raw)

March 12, 2006

About two years ago, on a late spring afternoon, Christopher Bailey and I were walking in London's Green Park. His apartment overlooked the park, but he didn't invite me up, and somehow I knew not to ask. There were any number of reasons that Bailey, the creative director of Burberry, might not wish a reporter to see his flat that day. It might be messy. Or, maybe, Bailey knew how it would look how he would look to have the hub of his private life presented as a kind of totem for his success at Burberry, which had just reported record profits of 167milliononsalesof167 million on sales of 167milliononsalesof1.2 billion. He just couldn't do that, allow his life to be reduced to a series of small motivations.

The trees were deep green, though the full English summer was still weeks away. On one of the folding chairs or blankets spread on the lawn, someone was smoking marijuana, and the smell greeted us as we entered a tunnel-like path of oaks that led down toward a cafe where Bailey and I had planned to stop and have tea. We had been walking for nearly three hours, covering sections of Soho and Piccadilly, neighborhoods that were familiar to him and that, I felt certain, would yield valuable clues about his revival of Burberry. They did not. For although Burberry's 150-year-old history echoes in the stones and monuments of this part of London, much as it does in the fields at Picardy and Flanders, where British soldiers in World War I were outfitted in Burberry trench coats, Bailey's approach to its legacy has been entirely modern. He makes extraordinarily simple and elegant connections between Burberry's orderly tradition and the fragmentary reality of contemporary life. In both his men's and his women's collections, there are always coats brass-buttoned, square-shouldered, a model of British form but, just as inevitably, there is something askew or radically de-emphasized about the outfit: a grandfatherly cardigan, a knit cap or a wrap dress in silver lamé that looks as if it were flung on in irritation.

Bailey, like many of his countrymen, has a fondness for sartorial flamboyance. For fall, he showed trench coats in houndstooth and quilted satin. Yet his instinct is to avoid artifice even as he admits it in a shocking, Hockney-esque hue. It's this tension, between the purely eccentric and the resolutely practical, that keeps Bailey separate from other luxury-goods designers. As Sarah Mower, a London-based writer for American Vogue, said, "I think Christopher's done a great thing by looking at the icons, like the trench, and just bringing it all down." Bailey told me: "This sounds silly to say, but our challenge at Burberry is to make something that doesn't look designer. And it's got nothing to do with the money aspect of fashion. There's almost a crassness to something being typically designer." But this indifference to material possessions, however calculated, is also a very British attitude.

Bailey is 34. He has described himself, not inaccurately, as "a scrawny English boy," and that statement as well as the fact that he listens intently, is honest and direct and speaks quickly but softly in a Yorkshire accent makes you think he is vulnerable and possibly even naïve. He is neither. His gentleness conceals real flint. Nonetheless, Bailey has trouble accepting that he is a fashion star. Rose Marie Bravo, Burberry's chief executive, said that when she told him that Forbes had put him on a list of influential designers, he was convinced that the magazine had made a mistake. "He said it seriously," she recalled. "He's completely oblivious."

Bailey is in charge of all of Burberry's product design, unlike his predecessor, Roberto Menichetti, who was responsible for only Burberry Prorsum, a small runway line. Bailey puts as much energy into the popular and vastly lucrative Burberry London label as he does into Prorsum. He's also more and more involved on the business side and finds he enjoys it. Last fall Bailey was named Britain's designer of the year, and in May, he and Bravo will be among the co-hosts of the annual Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the opening of AngloMania, an exhibition of British fashion. But while editors have celebrated his work at Burberry, Bailey has resisted bringing attention to himself. Not that he doesn't like to talk "He can talk the tail off a donkey," as one British journalist put it. In any case, Tim Blanks, a fashion writer in London, said: "You don't know anything about him, really. As a personality, he's very low wattage." Bailey's decision to live in Piccadilly and not in a trendy area like Notting Hill reflects a desire to remain in touch with both Burberry's heritage and its new global consumer his morning route to work leads him through tourist-rich old London and to escape monumentalizing fame. Judging by the reaction he received during our walk, I'd say he has succeeded. No one recognized him.

Still, as Blanks pointed out: "For all the London-ness of Christopher, his history isn't London. His outerness is Yorkshire." The perspective is actually greater than that: before Bailey went to Burberry, he worked for Donna Karan in New York and then Tom Ford at Gucci, dividing his time between London and Milan, where he shared a house with his boyfriend, Geert Cloet, the brand director of Miu Miu. You could argue that since Bailey draws many of his references from England of the 1960's and 70's from Mick Jagger and Lord Litchfield to the dollybirds of the Kings Road he is not really in touch with contemporary London life. But if he were any more in touch, Burberry would be what it was before he arrived, a small, pipping entity. Whatever is British in Burberry has been filtered through Bailey's perspective as an outsider, and that's why he's been clever. He's seeing England and Englishness from a great distance.

At the cafe we ordered tea and several sticky desserts. The place was crowded and cheerful, and through the large panes you could see a jagged line of strollers and old people reading their papers on benches. It was just another London day. After a while, Bailey's cellphone rang. He spoke a few words, hung up and returned to our conversation. If his face registered any change of feeling, any fear, I did not see it, nor did I have any reason to look for one. It was a sunny, pleasant day in England. But the telephone call, as Bailey was to later acknowledge, marked the beginning of a journey that transformed his life. On June 12, 2004, Geert, after weeks of experiencing headaches and difficulty speaking and writing, received the diagnosis of a brain tumor. A week later he had surgery in Milan. In September, Bailey brought Geert to London for further treatment and, at the same time, they bought a house in Yorkshire, so Geert could be near Bailey's family when the two of them could not be together. Bailey continued to work, doing shows in Milan and traveling every week, as well as going to Yorkshire to be with Geert. And he carried on like that, always giving news of Geert to people who asked, always sounding positive, until Geert died on July 25, 2005, at 36.

When I saw Bailey in November, he was, understandably, changed. A weight had settled on him, and, of course, a sadness. We were in his office at Burberry, where on the wall behind his desk were many photographs, including, as Bailey explained to me later, one of an ancient ash tree that stands on his property in Yorkshire. He spoke often of how quickly and permanently life can change and how it could render everything else void. The thought seemed to be on his mind, and I suspect it had been there every day since Geert's death. Geert had been the hub of his existence. They had been together eight years, since Bailey was at Gucci, and from what people told me, Geert, who was Belgian, was intelligent, multilingual and extremely handsome. He worked closely with Patrizio Bertelli, the chief executive of Prada. Bailey didn't seem to want to talk about Geert, and he didn't want to not talk about him, either.

"He was an incredible person; I wish you had known him," Bailey said to me. "He was a very happy person. He always had a very, very strong sense that you have to do what you love, and if you don't, then change it. With neither Geert nor myself, it was never about power or money or fame. Everything has always been about Is it challenging, exciting and stimulating? And fun. Because as soon as that stops, you have nothing. You can have squillions of pounds in your bank who cares? It doesn't change a thing."

He continued: "Geert was always very strong with me that I had to keep working. Of course, we discussed in depth me stopping work to take care of him full time. He really did not want that. I just basically went up to Yorkshire constantly. It was a very, very, I mean, a horrendous period. It is indescribable. But on Monday mornings he would always tell me it didn't matter how ill he was he would say: 'I want you to go to work. And when you get to work, I want you to tell me about your day.' That was our reality. No, that's not right. It was our only thing that wasn't linked to something extraordinarily sad. I became a kind of expert in brain tumors and hospitals and radiotherapy and chemotherapy. I would leave my office here at 9 p.m. and go home and spend three hours on the Internet researching and finding doctors and speaking to them."

I asked him if it helped.

He shook his head. "No, it didn't," he said. "That's why Geert was so much stronger and smarter than I. He knew instinctively the situation. I knew instinctively but refused to believe it. And I believed that knowledge would help us find another conclusion. But, actually, I don't believe it did. I'm also a big believer that there's a path for all of us, and no matter what happens, you're not changing that path. And I think that's a bit why I live the way that I do. I don't want this to sound flippant or ungrateful, but it doesn't mean that much to me, huge success in a career. Of course, it's wonderful, but it's not me or what makes me happy." He paused, and when he continued it was in a stronger voice: "I feel incredibly fortunate, and I will still be fortunate, that I had Geert. Nothing is as special as loving someone. Nothing at all. When you lose somebody that you love, everything else becomes unimportant. Also it's a tragic lesson to learn that when you do die, you really leave with nothing. It just doesn't matter."

Bailey then mentioned the photo of the ash tree. When he and Geert bought the house, the tree was in leaf. By spring, when it hadn't bloomed, they became concerned that something was wrong. Of course, in time, it put out buds. "We eventually slept in a room downstairs that overlooked the tree, and we just watched it blooming into the most beautiful thing in the world. That became the most important thing to us."

He has continued to go up to Yorkshire on weekends to visit school friends and family. Bailey's father is a carpenter, and his mother is a former chief of visual display at Marks & Spencer, and he has a sister, who lives in Yorkshire, as well. Bailey has spoken to me on several occasions about his family and the balancing effect that they and friends continue to have on him. "If they even see my picture in the newspaper, they have a giggle for about three minutes," Bailey said, "and it's the wrapping for the fish and chips." He smiled. "We get so caught up in our little world. Yet it's those people who count. They're the people who are shopping. The fashion people are asking for things for free. But it's the people who are working very hard, earning possibly a lot of money, possibly not, who go out and buy the clothes."

Yet, as Bailey knows, the fashion world is also a business, and the competitive challenges are becoming increasingly severe. A close friend, the shoe designer Edmundo Castillo, said that, for now, Bailey's primary concern must be "to figure out who he is without Geert."

"He's going to have to rebuild his personal life," Castillo told me.

Burberry, meanwhile, faces a number of pressures. The brand's luxury image has been seriously hurt, at least in Britain, by its popularity with chavs, a rowdy working-class subgroup that has taken up the Burberry check as a kind of emblem of mass entitlement, tainting its appeal among fashion consumers. One chav Web site, www.chavmum.co.uk, brazenly carpets its home page with the tan-and-black plaid, and the chavs have helped to flood the market with Burberry fakes. Although sales in Britain of Burberry products represent less than 10 percent of the company's total, Bravo admits that the chavs cost Burberry business. "They've done their damage," she said.

At the same time that the chavs were sucking away Burberry's prestige, Bravo thought the brand was not putting out a compelling fashion message. "The market had gotten new and sexy, and I felt we were stuck," she said. "Christopher said, 'Leave it with me."' She is satisfied that the company is now back on course, with new handbag designs and the chavs apparently attaching themselves to other labels. "It's a very good moment," said Bravo, who steps down as the chief executive in June. "Christopher's got a lot of momentum now."

Still, another source of concern is Prorsum. Although it was always conceptualized as a niche business, something that brought cachet to the brand without generating much, if any, profit, its virtual absence in stores, including Burberry's flagships, has frustrated consumers who want Bailey's clothes but can't find them. As Bailey said, "We've had an amazing response to Prorsum, and you don't see it. But if we're building this line without people even having a real exposure to it, then it could become something bigger." He added, "It's also a test for how people perceive Burberry that people can and do relate to it on a stronger design level. Burberry had a very strong history. Very British, very functional. How far can you push the boundaries of what Burberry stands for?" Bravo says the company is about to expand in a major way.

It's easy to forget that Bailey has been at Burberry just five years. And it's been only in the past four or five seasons that he's really begun to show people what he can do. Geert's death was a crushing event. Yet it has probably also served to heighten his sensitivity to things.

While we were in his office, he told me, "That world of real life I find much more fascinating than the world of celebrities. The glam world is a facade, and it's very easy to get that life. You know how to get it it doesn't take a genius. Real life is so much more complicated, and more stimulating, more exciting, depressing and happy." Bailey is convinced there is a shift taking place, one that will influence design. "People have become more savvy and aware of everything. And you feel that on the street. You feel they know what's going on. And when you have that high level of awareness, it's more difficult for a brand to shine. Nothing can be flippant or surface anymore, and I think that's affecting design."

Bailey often speaks these days about how he could be happy doing something else, and that he could go back to stocking shelves in a supermarket in Yorkshire. But I think he is just testing himself, to see if he's still alive. Because he said: "I have so much I want to do here. I want to define more clearly what Burberry is." He smiled. "You know, I've understood since Day 1 that I'm the holder of these incredible keys but I'm only the holder and I'm going to pass them on. I'm like a tiny drop in 150 years of history."

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