The Photograph That Changed Everything
In 2002, actress Danniella Westbrook was photographed on a public outing dressed head-to-toe in Burberry Nova check. Hat. Jacket. Bag. Her daughter's pushchair. Every single item covered in the same iconic pattern. The images went everywhere — tabloids, television, the internet. The next morning, Burberry had a serious problem on its hands.
The brand had been building something for 146 years. A single set of photographs threatened to undo a significant part of it overnight.
How It Got There
The Danniella Westbrook moment didn't come from nowhere. The Nova check had been creeping into a very different cultural territory for years before that photograph appeared. Replicas were being produced at scale and sold across market stalls throughout the UK. The pattern had been adopted by football hooligan culture and the broader chav subculture that dominated British tabloid coverage in the early 2000s. By the time Westbrook appeared in those images, the association was already well established in certain circles.
This is one of the most unforgiving realities of the luxury industry. Brands live and die by who is seen wearing them. Exclusivity isn't just about price — it's about perception, association and control. And Burberry had lost control of all three simultaneously.
The wrong people were wearing Burberry. And everyone knew it.
The Industry Turned
Major UK department stores started pulling the brand from their shelves. Sales fell. The term "chav check" entered mainstream usage and stuck. A brand founded in 1856, worn by polar explorers crossing Antarctica, by the Royal Family, by British military officers in the trenches of the First World War — was now being associated with everything it had spent 150 years building away from.
The heritage was still there. The craftsmanship was still there. The trench coat was still one of the most iconic garments in the history of fashion. None of that mattered when the name had become a punchline.
For many brands in that position, the story ends there. The association becomes permanent, the customer base shifts permanently downmarket, and the brand never recovers its positioning. Burberry could easily have become a cautionary tale.
The Riskiest Decision In Luxury History
Christopher Bailey had been appointed creative director in 2001, just as the problem was reaching its peak. What he did next was one of the boldest moves any luxury house has ever made.
He removed the iconic Nova check from the brand's most accessible products entirely.
Think about what that decision actually means. The check was Burberry's most recognisable asset. It was the shorthand for the brand across every market in the world. Removing it from the entry-level product range meant removing the thing that most customers associated most strongly with the brand — with no guarantee that anything better would replace it in the public consciousness.
A brand voluntarily removing its own signature. No safety net. Just conviction that the only way to rebuild was to make the check rare again.
The Comeback
What followed was one of the most remarkable rebrands in fashion history.
Kate Moss became the face of the brand — repositioning Burberry in the cultural conversation around the kind of effortless British cool that the tabloid coverage had temporarily buried. The campaigns were beautiful and the association shifted almost immediately in the right direction.
Burberry then did something no luxury house had done before — it livestreamed its runway shows, opening them up to a global digital audience at a time when every other major house was keeping the runway strictly exclusive. The move was counterintuitive for a brand trying to rebuild exclusivity, but it worked. It repositioned Burberry as a forward-thinking British institution rather than a fading one.
The check became rare again because it was no longer on every accessible product in the range. And rare meant desirable again. The customers who had been embarrassed to wear it started coming back. The customers who had never left felt vindicated. And a new generation of customers discovered the brand through its digital presence and found something genuinely worth wanting.
Where Burberry Stands Now
The same check. The same trench coat. The same British heritage that has existed since 1856. But controlled this time — distributed carefully, priced appropriately, presented with the confidence of a brand that knows exactly what it is and who it is for.
Burberry has faced a second difficult period more recently, with sales falling and the brand undergoing another significant reset under CEO Joshua Schulman. But the playbook from the early 2000s has informed the current recovery — return to the core, control the positioning, let the heritage do the work. The brand returned to profit in FY2026, and Schulman has described the results as a meaningful inflection point.
The trench coat and the check are still the most powerful assets in the range. They were powerful enough to survive the chav era. They are powerful enough to survive whatever comes next.