Daniel Lee must be considering home a lot these days. Not just his 17th-century country house in his native Yorkshire, which he bought last year to use at weekends, but his London place, on a leafy 19th-century square, which he has had for the last five years. It’s a hot July morning in the city and Lee, Burberry’s chief creative officer, is enjoying a reprieve from having builders in; the AC has been on the blink, the underfloor heating went awry and he has endured one home (and soul) destroying flood. He has sequestered himself in the basement, decorated with a beige sectional sofa, just a shade paler than the classic Burberry trench, and a Gary Hume painting, Greenness Is a Kind of Grief – Lee is a keen fan of Hume’s. The room looks onto the garden and Lee has taken to lying out on a lounger; by adjusting its angle and that of the television, he can watch the World Cup from outside.

“My social life is watching the match every night on TV; it’s a bit sad, isn’t it?” Lee says in a soft voice accented by both down-to-earth Yorkshire and dry humour. “I love all sport – Wimbledon’s great – but I prefer the energy of a football match to a tennis match. Tennis is very polite. People lose themselves at football. It’s like a cult, isn’t it?” I didn’t have Lee down as a sports fanatic, but maybe it’s no surprise. Burberry has certainly worked with plenty of footballers – Declan Rice, Leah Williamson, Eberechi Eze – who Lee reveres as much as the likes of Skepta and Olivia Colman, whom he loves collaborating with. There’s also his daily 8am gym training before work. What’s your favourite thing to do at the gym, I ask him. “Exercising lying down,” he says, laughing. “The bench press is nice because you can just lie there. I don’t love cardio any more; it hurts my knees.”

Lee tells me this as we sit in the garden, one of several meetings we will have this week. He is not what I was expecting. My impression, admittedly from a few relatively short interactions over the years, was that he is personable yet also somewhat guarded and remote, an impression shaped perhaps by the fact that he rarely speaks to the press. This is his first magazine interview in a number of years, and the idea is that he and I will chat about his evolution of Burberry. It soon becomes apparent that Lee, 40, is candid, funny and thoughtful; he has expectation-defying down to a fine art. “Daniel appreciates realness – and openness,” says Skepta. “There are a lot of factors that make him a great designer, but mostly it’s because he has the best eye. I’d pretty much wear everything he makes.”

Appointed Burberry’s chief creative officer in 2022, he has moved the 170-year-old British brand from his highly conceptual debut, all electric-blue blanket checks and graphic red-rose prints, to the more recent collections, which have been universally praised for their cool, considered functionality as much as for the cut and thrust of fashion. He came to Burberry after three years at Bottega Veneta, an era that flared up like a firework thanks to the success of the Cassette bag and Lido sandals, with Lee quitting before the flare extinguished itself. Before that: six years with Phoebe Philo at Celine, eventually becoming her design director. And before that, Donna Karan in New York and internships at Maison Margiela and Nicolas Ghesquière-era Balenciaga after he’d graduated from Central Saint Martins.

It’s a CV that reads like a highbrow conceptualist designer’s dream. Yet you could say it is Lee’s Burberry role that is most reflective of who he is: pragmatic, unpretentious, driven by a sense of purpose and the need to be authentic. For his friend Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who has known him since Bottega Veneta, Lee the person and the designer are one and the same. “The reason I feel so at ease in Daniel’s company is that he is grounded and down-to-earth,” she says. “He has this incredible talent and work ethic, yet there’s no pretence with him, no drama. I can have a conversation with him and it doesn’t feel like, for want of a better word, .”

When he started at Burberry, Lee says, “it took me a minute to adjust. What I did in the past was about the dream [of fashion] and it was the accessories that were the focus. The clothes
here are still the dream, yet they’re wearable and useful, not just fashion for a show. Designing Burberry makes you question and consider everything. The ultimate goal is to make the go-to piece in your wardrobe – which I think the trench coat is.” He sees himself as “a making designer”, he says. “I enjoy being in the moment and working with instinct, with craft, with my hands – the physicality of that.”

From left: Edie Campbell wears silk poplin trench coat and sequined georgette dress. Alva Claire wears map-print nylon sateen trench coat. Clothes and accessories (throughout), Burberry.

Lee’s love of making comes from his family, father Ian and mother Jenny, and he has a brother, Richard, and a sister, Sophie. Daniel is the eldest. To say they’re close is like saying Burberry knows its checks. Ian was a mechanic before he retired and he now lives in Lee’s Yorkshire home, which is not far from Bradford, where Lee was born and raised. His dad has set up a workshop at the back of the house to renovate motorbikes, a lifelong passion, which tickles his son no end because when he and his brother were kids, they would ride the bikes in a field at the back of their house. It was his mum who was “the creative one of the family”, Lee says. “She was always making – sewing curtains and baking fancy birthday cakes. She made a Noah’s Ark for us. And she even made my aunt, who had a cleaning business, a vacuum cleaner. It made me think, ‘I just want a job where I can make things.’”

Curtains that Lee’s mum sewed for the family living room now hang in one of the bedrooms at his place in Yorkshire, although “his” is a bit of a misnomer; he sees it as the whole family’s home as much as his. The impetus to find somewhere in Yorkshire came in the aftermath of his mum’s death just before Christmas 2024. Lee says that he became “very introspective; I was really at home, thinking. In those moments, the creative element of work was soothing; it was like therapy.” He hadn’t even been thinking about getting a place up north, but the undertow of emotion carried him there. His brother and sister-in-law, who live locally, were looking to buy a new home, Lee joined the hunt and the house he ended up taking was the first and only one he saw. “Before that, I’d always had this quest to live abroad, work abroad, see the world,” he says. “When you’re young, you feel like you’ve got endless time, [then] you realise that actually time is finite. My family’s not going to be around forever. I go home and I value my time with them – and I want to spend more time with them.” (One area where Lee would rather keep his private life private is when it comes to dating, but he readily says that he’d like to start his own family: “I would love to have children.”)

From left: Romeo Beckham wears silk shirt, silk scarf, leather trousers, belt, and biker boots. Simone Ashley wears embellished satin dress, leather shoes, and frame bag. Paapa Essiedu wears nylon sateen trench coat, silk shirt, wool trousers, and leather shoes.

His aunt Debbie, his mum’s sister, has moved next door to the 1680s house (“I think old buildings are magical – you absorb all that past, all that energy”), now full of family heirlooms, including an old cartwheel light fitting made by his grandfather for his grandmother. It was Debbie who took Lee to London for the first time when he was 12, visiting the London Eye, seeing and going to the then unbelievably hip restaurant Sketch. “My aunt was being trendy,” Lee says, laughing affectionately. “She also took me to Harvey Nichols in Leeds. I wasn’t a kid growing up reading but looking at the amazing windows at Harvey Nichols and seeing the clothes, that’s when I started to think about fashion.” His grandparents would take him to the Bradford Alhambra theatre to see the likes of (his grandmother’s favourite), something he still loves to this day; on a recent trip to New York, it was the much-lauded revival of .

Simone wears leather shirt, pleated leather skirt, boots, and bag.

Lee’s family has always attended his Burberry runway shows, yet in the weeks and months after his mum’s death, the closeness deepened even more. His grandmother came to the show in February 2025 with a photograph of Lee’s mum in her handbag and it was she who sat with him the night before the presentation as he worked on the last of the fittings. His sister, meanwhile, wore the Burberry trench that had been their mum’s; it had been bequeathed to his mum by Lee’s great-aunt Eve. She had worked at Burberry’s Yorkshire factories – there’s still one left, at Castleford, where trench coats are finished by hand – and Eve was given the trench when she retired. “My mum wore it to my first show,” Lee recalls. “I have a really sweet photo of her and me at the after-party and she’s in that coat.”

“It means a great deal to all of us,” says Lee’s father about his son coming back. “One thing about Daniel is that he has never forgotten his roots and I think that’s why Yorkshire will always feel like home to him.” The feeling of reconnection to where he started, and who’s important to him, is something to which Lee has given a lot of thought. “That’s the real value of the North [for me],” he says. “It gives you a sense of shared ownership of the difficult times, which makes things easier. [As a family], we’ve had lots of happy moments and also hard moments. Everyone rallies around, supporting one another. Ultimately that’s teamwork – and I think that translates into the workplace too. Being in this role is sometimes hard but shared burdens are easier burdens.”

Paapa wears embroidered sateen parka.

Burberry’s headquarters are on Horseferry Road in London, walking distance from both Buckingham Palace and Tate Britain. Entering the lobby you’re unsurprisingly given the usual security pass and surprisingly (to me, anyway) a pamphlet with useful hints for visitors, as if you were at a tourist attraction – if that tourist attraction happened to be a global British brand, which this past March announced pre-tax profits of £49 million, up from a £66 million loss last year. Lee’s office and studio are on the seventh floor. He designs Tuesday to Thursday, and Monday and Friday are prep days, so the team, he says, can get weekends off from work. Lee likes to be efficient, something helped by the ease that comes with two of his team being close friends from his college days. What also helps: Virgil Abloh told him creative directors shouldn’t waste their time emailing, so he doesn’t; he and his team speak constantly via WhatsApp instead.

In one corner of the vast workroom, Burberry archivist Carly Eck has assembled a rail of pieces taken from the 25,000 the company holds, including the earliest trench, dating from 1917, and the only one from the First World War that is known to exist. She has pulled pieces with an eye to what Lee has responded to: the 1930s Highlander cape, with straps to allow freedom of movement, which, she says, “Daniel and I were looking at only last week”; a motoring overall that Lee riffed on for his a/w ’24 collection; and a coat worn by explorer Ernest Shackleton, which Lee also referenced in 2023. Eck and Lee get together at the beginning of every season, to help build narratives connecting Burberry past and present. “In Daniel’s first week here, we met three times,” she says. You can see why Lee, a designer in love with history, purpose and fabric, would find the archive a delight. His intense curiosity has certainly paid unexpected dividends: the ridiculously cute duck hats Lee did for his Burberry debut were inspired by drawings in one of the brand’s catalogues circa 1940, laid out on a table nearby.

What Lee is striving for, he says, is to capture that Burberry is “a lifestyle brand: what we do is try to provide people with answers about how to live the best possible way. We make clothes to protect people, to make them feel good, ready, sophisticated. I think the fashion is secondary. Ultimately, the design here starts from a place of utility, functionality, practicality. It has to work before it has to be, let’s say, decorative.” His Burberry collections thus far have variously offered blanket-lined parkas, battalion jackets, long kilts, jaunty capelets and dandy-ish suiting; what model and equestrian Edie Campbell, who has worked with Burberry since she was 15 (“I still had braces!”) calls, “very wearable, but with an edge. It’s joyful and there’s a lightness and a playfulness to it, which I really like.” Accessories, the successes for any fashion brand, are in his mind, even if a star hasn’t quite emerged yet.

Romeo wears wool coat.

If the past is in the room, so is the future. Burberry’s s/s ’27 collection, which he showed in September at Chelsea College of Arts – Jodie Turner-Smith, Jonathan Bailey and Fiona Shaw on the front row; Central Cee on the catwalk – features trenches both diaphanous, etched with embroidery and in leather that’s been lavishly traced with beading; utilitarian cotton drill mixed with sequins; floral blousons and skirts worn with earthy, low-heeled buckled mules; and jewel-like high slingback shoes made a little less precious by being paired with slouchy socks. One thing always on Lee’s mind is making Burberry speak to women. “The brand is born out of menswear and the trenches are a very masculine thing,” he says. “We’re always trying to bring more femininity to it.”

Colour is a way to get into that and it’s something that Lee has decisively brought to the brand from the very beginning, with what he describes as softer, moorland tones, just as he did at Bottega Veneta with its pre- intense green; s/s ’27, meanwhile, sings with shades of dusky pink, aubergine, duck-egg blue and a soft yet still sunny yellow, reflecting the more casual, lived in, yet still special feel that he wanted the clothes to have. Gary Hume recalls meeting Lee when they began working on a Burberry project in 2024. Walking around Hume’s studio, they’d touch the art, communing with it. Having worked with Lee, the artist feels that the designer’s use of colour “doesn’t feel like it’s added on; it’s entirely integral to what Daniel does.”

Edie wears silk poplin jacket with shearling trim, sequined jersey dress, and leather shoes.

For s/s ’27, Lee worked with celebrated octogenarian print designer Celia Birtwell, who was part of the creative explosion in British art and design in the 1960s, along with her husband, designer Ossie Clark, and artist David Hockney, a close friend. Lee had gone to see the recent Hockney exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery in London – he feels a strong affinity with the Bradford-born artist – and a gingham tablecloth that Hockney used as a leitmotif sparked an idea to collaborate with Birtwell. She has created a check with a painterly, hand-drawn feel to it and some rather charming vintage-wallpaper floral prints; they feel organic and fresh, a million miles away from CAD – and AI. “Celia brings a human hand, an emotional hand, to something,” Lee says, thrilled by what she has done. “We have an incredible archive but sometimes it’s exciting to see new things.”

At this point in the life cycle of a collection, close to finished but still in flux, Lee will think about something his former Celine boss once told him. “Phoebe said to me, ‘If 80 per cent of the show is good, then you know you’ve done a really good job,’” he says. “That has stuck with me because, in striving always to get to 100 per cent, you can drive yourself mad. You’re always searching for that thing you feel really excited about, that sparks your enthusiasm. It is very impulsive; it is very childlike. What I like is something that feels clear, direct, focused; where there’s an idea that has really evolved.”

From left: Alva wears mohair/silk shawl coat and chevron-knit dress. Romeo wears leather jacket with shearling collar, silk shirt, flocked jeans, and belt.

Lee and I meet for the last time at the Regency Cafe near the Burberry headquarters in Westminster. Founded in 1946, it hasn’t changed much since, still a haven of egg chips, Formica and tea so wonderfully strong you could stand a teaspoon up in it. In its own way, the cafe’s story isn’t so different from Burberry’s: halcyon Britain, yet a Britishness of global fascination. Seated among the Regency regulars are hordes of creatively dressed kids from all around the world, Instagramming their full English breakfasts, the very kind of young, style-conscious types who Burberry would want to attract, though not only them. As someone recently put it to me, it is an egalitarian brand, as much for the aristo in a beaten-up trench in a Land Rover as it is for a bloke on the football terraces. Speaking of which, Lee arrives in a Romeo Beckham Intra England bomber jacket over a Nike Palace England T-shirt; it’s his way of paying tribute to this evening’s England versus Argentina match. (I hate to remind everyone, months later, of the eventual 2-1 loss to Argentina.)

Pride in Britishness is, of course, intrinsic to Burberry. “It stands for heritage and culture, and all the things and all the people that those mean,” says model Alva Claire, and that’s a definition Lee would agree with. “It brings richness to our story,” he says. “We are the most famous British luxury brand, but in a way we’re bigger than fashion; we are a British institution. We’re there to celebrate the best of Britain, great creativity – and also great locations.” Lee recounts how so many of the shoots to showcase Burberry’s collections have been deliberately shot outside of London: Skye, Somerset, Norfolk, the Lake District… and he readily agrees that, while acknowledging the importance of London Fashion Week to Burberry, it would be great to show somewhere else in the UK, but where? “Chanel did Manchester…” I say, and “Dior did Scotland,” he says. I offer up Yorkshire; I mean, why not, what with the Castleford factory and the Keighley mill? Plus, it’s where it all started for Lee.

Burberry’s longstanding embrace of a broad sweep of the UK predates the decentralising happening at the moment. Looking beyond London is now, under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, official government policy, what with the establishment of a 10 Downing Street outpost in Manchester and a promise to devolve more power to local authorities, and also a cultural imperative; the British Fashion Council’s plan, titled BFC 2030, is committed to bringing investment and opportunity to six cities around the UK. The BFC’s CEO, Laura Weir, sees Burberry, and Lee, as crucial to this. “The beautiful thing about Burberry, and perhaps the most compelling part of its story, is that it’s not defined by one city, it’s defined by the nation,” Weir says. “That started before Daniel but he is now the custodian of that message and carrying that mantle exceptionally well; to have the person leading Burberry being from Bradford at a time when Burnham has come into power and the cultural vernacular is about decentralising… well, it’s Burberry’s moment, isn’t it?”

Right now, Lee is thinking about 170 years’ worth of moments. The anniversary is, he says, “always on our minds: how do we do it justice? [But] we have been ambitious this year.” Indeed: as well as a months-long campaign photographing 170 people all over the world wearing Burberry, a special exhibition, The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon, is on at the V&A ahead of the company’s funding of the museum’s new costume wing, opening in 2028, and another Burberry exhibition, Ever Forward, The Archive On Stage, opens soon in Shanghai. Anyone would be asking themselves what’s left to do and for Lee, there’s plenty. Top of mind for him professionally is transforming the brand’s retail environments for its 410 outposts around the world and personally, well, he wouldn’t mind at some point in his life living in a hot country. Yet he’s not in any rush. He wants progress to be measured and meaningful; to take it in his stride. “I mean,” he says, smiling, “I really feel quite content.”

“The ultimate goal is to make the go-to piece in your wardrobe – which I think the trench coat is,” says Daniel Lee.

Hair: Mari Ohashi. Barber: Christian Okonta. Make-up: Siobhan Furlong, Quelle Bester. Nails: Robbie Tomkins. Tailor: Della George. Set design: Grace Snellock. Production: Tiagi