Burberry: Gabardine at the South Pole to the Check Banned in Pubs

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Thomas Burberry was 21 when he opened his shop in Basingstoke in 1856, and in 1879 he introduced gabardine, waterproofing cotton yarn before weaving it so tightly that rain stayed out while sweat could escape. Roald Amundsen's 1911 South Pole party wore it, as did Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition and George Mallory on Everest in 1924. In World War I the company made the trench coat for British officers, with epaulettes, D rings and a storm flap built for combat, and the red, camel, black and white check was added in the 1920s simply as a lining.

After Great Universal Stores bought the company in the mid 1950s, licensing spread the check onto everything; the Japanese license alone generated over 430 million euros in retail value. By 2001 to 2005 counterfeits and chav and football hooligan associations led some UK pubs to ban the pattern. CEO Angela Ahrendts and creative director Christopher Bailey removed the check from about 90 percent of products, bought back licenses including the Spanish business worth 20 percent of revenue, and pushed early into online retail. Sales passed £2 billion, market value tripled to £7 billion, and by 2012 Ahrendts was the UK's highest paid CEO.

• Pilot Mrs. Victor Bruce flew around the world in 1930 in a reversible coat of gabardine on one side and tweed on the other.
• In 2018 Greenpeace revealed the company had destroyed over £90 million of unsold goods over five years, a practice it then halted.
• Burberry pledged to be climate positive by 2040 and dropped real fur and exotic skins.
• Statements on Xinjiang cotton in 2021 led to backlash and lost sales in China.
• Wrestler MJF swapped his AEW title strap for a custom Burberry check belt, and 2024 to 2025 profit warnings led to plans to cut up to 1,700 jobs by 2027.