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CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY
Lee and model Edie Campbell near Lee’s home in the rolling hills of Yorkshire, England. Sittings Editor: Tabitha Simmons.Photographed by Anton Gottlob. Vogue, Winter 2027.
Daniel Lee must be considering the notion of home a lot these days. Not just his 17th-century country house in his native Yorkshire, which he bought last year, but his London place, on a leafy 19th-century square, where he has lived for the last five years. Lee, Burberry’s chief creative officer, is enjoying a reprieve from having repair professionals in—the AC has been on the blink, the underfloor heating went awry, and he has already endured one soul-destroying flood. On this hot July morning, he has sequestered himself in the basement, decorated with a beige sectional sofa and a Gary Hume painting, Greenness Is a Kind of Grief. 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 soccer from outside.
“My social life is watching the match on TV; it’s a bit sad, isn’t it?” Lee says in a soft voice accented by dry humor. “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 he seems to revere footballers as much as the likes of Skepta and Olivia Colman, whom he loves collaborating with. (Lee supports Arsenal.) There’s also his daily 8 a.m. gym sessions before work. “The bench press is nice, because you can just lie there,” he says, laughing. “I don’t love cardio anymore—it hurts my knees.”
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, 40, tells me this as we sit in his garden, the first of our several meetings. In person, Lee is candid, funny, and thoughtful. “Daniel appreciates realness—and openness,” says Skepta. “And he has the best eye. I’d pretty much wear everything he makes.”
Appointed Burberry’s chief creative officer in 2022, Lee has taken the 170-year-old British brand from his highly conceptual debut, all electric-blue blanket checks and graphic red-rose prints, to his more recent collections, widely praised as much for their cool, considered functionality as for the cut and thrust of their forward direction. (Lee has also seen the brand reach pretax profits of over $65 million in 2026, up from an almost $88 million loss last year.) 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 spark extinguished itself. Before that: six years with Phoebe Philo at Celine, eventually becoming her design director; and before that Donna Karan in New York, following internships at Maison Margiela and Nicolas Ghesquière–era Balenciaga after his graduation from Central Saint Martins.
While the CV reads like a conceptualist designer’s dream, Lee’s Burberry role may be the most reflective of who he really is: pragmatic, unpretentious, driven by a sense of purpose. 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 pretense with him, no drama.”
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.
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 for a show. Designing Burberry makes you question and consider everything.” 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.”
Lee’s love of making comes from his family—his father Ian and mother Jenny, his brother Richard and sister Sophie. (Daniel is the eldest.) 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. He’s set up a workshop at the back of the house to renovate motorcycles, a lifelong passion, which delights his son to no end—when he and his brother were kids, they would ride the bikes in a field at the back of their house. His mom was the creative one. “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,” Lee says. “It made me think, I just want a job where I can make things.”
Simone wears leather shirt, pleated leather skirt, boots, and bag.
Curtains that Lee’s mom sewed for the family living room now hang in one of the bedrooms at his house in Yorkshire, although “his” is a bit of a misnomer: Lee sees the place as his whole family’s home. The impetus to find somewhere in the area came in the aftermath of his mom’s death just before Christmas 2024. “In those moments,” Lee says, “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 realize that, actually, time is finite. My family’s not going to be around forever. 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, though he readily says that he’d like to start his own family: “I would love to have children.”)
His aunt Debbie, his mom’s sister, has moved next door to the 1680s house. It was Debbie who brought Lee to London for the first time when he was 12—they saw the London Eye, took in The Lion King, and ate at the then 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 Vogue, 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 Alhambra Theatre in Bradford to see the likes of Chicago (his grandmother’s favorite), which ignited a lifelong love of theater. (On a recent trip to New York, he caught the much-lauded revival of The Rocky Horror Show.)
Paapa wears embroidered sateen parka.
While Lee’s family has always attended his Burberry runway shows, in the weeks and months after his mom’s death, the closeness deepened. His grandmother came to the show in February 2025 with a photograph of Lee’s mom 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 mom’s. “She wore it to my first show,” Lee recalls.
“One thing about Daniel is that he has never forgotten his roots,” says Lee’s father, “and I think that’s why Yorkshire will always feel like home to him.” That feeling of reconnection 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.”
Burberry’s headquarters are on Horseferry Road in London, walking distance from both Buckingham Palace and Tate Britain. Lee’s office and studio are on the seventh floor. He designs Tuesday to Thursday, reserving Monday and Friday for prep days—so the team, he says, can have their weekends free of work. Lee likes to be efficient—the late Virgil Abloh told him that creative directors shouldn’t waste their time emailing, so he doesn’t: He and his team speak constantly via WhatsApp instead.
Romeo wears wool coat.
In one corner of the vast workroom, Burberry archivist Carly Eck has assembled a rail of pieces taken from the 25,000 that the company holds—including the earliest trench, dating from 1917—with an eye to what Lee has responded to: the 1930s Highlander cape, with straps to allow freedom of movement; a motoring overall that Lee riffed on for his fall 2024 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. Lee’s intense curiosity has certainly paid unexpected dividends. The ridiculously cute duck hats that he included in his Burberry debut were inspired by drawings in one of the brand’s catalogs circa 1930s, laid out on a table nearby.
“What we do,” Lee says, “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. 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 dandyish 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.” Accessories—the ka-ching! successes for any fashion brand—are on his mind, even if a star hasn’t quite emerged yet.
But if the past is in the room, so is the future. Burberry’s spring 2027 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 and etched with embroidery, as well as rendered 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: making Burberry speak more 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.”
Edie wears silk poplin jacket with shearling trim, sequined jersey dress, and leather shoes.
Color is one way 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; spring 2027, meanwhile, sings with shades of dusky pink, aubergine, duck-egg blue, and a soft-sunny yellow, reflecting the casual, lived-in feel that he wanted to impart on the clothes. Gary Hume, the painter, 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 now worked with Lee, the artist feels that the designer’s use of color “doesn’t feel like it’s added on—it’s entirely integral to what Daniel does.”
For spring 2027, Lee also worked with the celebrated octogenarian print designer Celia Birtwell, an intrinsic part of the creative explosion in British art and design in the 1960s, along with her husband, designer Ossie Clark, and David Hockney, her close friend. Lee had gone to see the recent Hockney exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London—he feels a strong affinity with the Bradford-born artist, who died in June—and a gingham tablecloth that Hockney used as a leitmotif sparked an idea to collaborate with Birtwell, who created a check with a painterly feel to it and some rather charming vintage-wallpaper floral prints. They feel organic and fresh, a million miles away from CAD—or 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.”
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 are to meet for the last time at the Regency Café near the Burberry headquarters. Founded in 1946, it hasn’t changed much since, still a haven of egg and chips, Formica, and tea so wonderfully strong you could stand a teaspoon up in it. In its own way, the café’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, of course. It is an egalitarian brand, as much for the aristo in a beaten-up trench driving a Land Rover as it is for the bloke on the football terraces.
Pride in Britishness is, after all, 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 Lee seconds the thought. “We are the most famous British luxury brand,” he says, “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 his Burberry shoots have been deliberately located outside of London—Skye, Somerset, Norfolk, the Lake District—and he readily agrees (while acknowledging the importance of London Fashion Week to Burberry) that it would be great to show somewhere else in the UK. But where? “Chanel did Manchester…,” I say; “Dior did Scotland,” he adds.
Lee on the winding, cobbled streets of Haworth, in West Yorkshire.
Right now, though, Lee is thinking about 170 years’ worth of moments. The anniversary is, he says, “always on our minds. How do we do it justice? We have been ambitious this year.” Indeed: As well as a monthslong campaign photographing 170 people all over the world wearing Burberry, a special exhibition, “The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon,” is at the V&A ahead of the company’s funding of the museum’s new costume wing, opening in 2028; another Burberry exhibition, “Ever Forward: The Archive On Stage,” opens this month 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 413 outposts around the world. 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 stride. “I mean,” he says, smiling, “I really feel quite content.”
In this story: Hair, Mari Ohashi; makeup, Siobhan Furlong; grooming, Quelle Bester; manicurist, Robbie Tomkins; tailor, Della George.
Produced by Tiagi. Set Design: Grace Snellock.
