Burberry Brand History: From a Draper's Apprentice to Everest and the Trench Coat

The 21-Year-Old Draper Who Invented Gabardine

Basingstoke, 1856: A Provincial Start

The mackintosh was a town solution to a country problem. Fine for stepping between a carriage and a doorway in Mayfair; useless for a twelve-hour day in a wet Hampshire field. Burberry had trained from the cloth up, understood what fabrics could and couldn't do at a structural level, and spent the better part of two decades asking a question that seems obvious only in retrospect: what if the yarn itself were waterproofed, before it was ever woven into cloth?

The Gabardine Revolution (1879)

By 1879, he had his answer. Gabardine was a tightly woven twill made from pre-treated yarn, which meant the weave stayed open to air movement while the individual fibres turned water away. No rubber layer. No sealed coating. Just engineering at the level of the thread, which is a completely different thing, and the difference matters enormously in practice. He patented it in 1888. The patent document reads like the work of someone who understood exactly what he had made and why: precise, functional, completely without vanity. The language is that of a craftsman rather than a promoter. Over the next two decades, that obsession produced a fabric that would be worn near the summit of Everest, on the Ross Ice Shelf, and in the trenches of northern France.

Polar Explorers, Mountaineers, and the Birth of a Legend

Shackleton's Antarctic Seal of Approval

Antarctica tested it first. Ernest Shackleton's 1907-1909 Nimrod Expedition and Robert Falcon Scott's 1910-1913 Terra Nova Expedition both used Burberry gabardine as the outer layer of their windproof kit. The reasoning was structural rather than reputational: gabardine's tight weave resisted wind penetration as effectively as it shed moisture, and in polar conditions, wind chill is often what crosses the line between manageable cold and fatal cold. No laboratory test could have replicated those conditions. The expeditions did it instead. Shackleton came back with an endorsement no advertising budget could have manufactured. Scott, who didn't come back, was wearing Burberry-supplied kit at the pole.

Mallory's Fatal Climb: Burberry at the Summit of Everest

Then 1924. George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, the British Mount Everest Expedition's third attempt on the summit, were seen through a telescope near the base of the Second Step on June 8th, still climbing, before cloud closed over the Northeast Ridge and they were gone. When Mallory's body was recovered in 1999, he was wearing natural fibre underlayers and, as the outer shell, Burberry gabardine. A fabric invented in a provincial draper's shop in Basingstoke, worn by a man somewhere near 8,800 metres in 1924, in circumstances that remain genuinely unresolved. Whether he reached the summit before he died is still unknown. What is not unknown is that gabardine was his choice for the highest point any human had then attempted.

From Workwear to Military Icon: The Trench Coat

World War I and the Officers' Coat That Changed Fashion

Strangely, the War Office came to Burberry in 1914 not to invent something new but to refine something that already existed. Burberry had been producing a belted gabardine coat for officers since around 1895, a precursor design called the Tielocken with a single-ring buckle closure and no buttons. The commission pushed the design toward what we now recognise: double-breasted, storm flap over the shoulder, D-rings on the belt for hanging field kit, a gun flap on the right chest. These were practical additions, each one with a specific function. The coat accumulated its hardware in a way that feels purposeful rather than decorative.

Officers wore them in the trenches. When the war ended, the coats came home with them. By the 1920s the trench coat had migrated from active service into civilian dress, carrying with it the particular authority of something worn under real conditions by people who had no margin for failure. Burberry didn't invent the name. But the proportions, the hardware, the structure: all of it came from that War Office commission, and it was Burberry's version that defined the silhouette everything since has been measured against.

The Burberry Check: From Lining to Logo

The check lining arrived later, and for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics. Burberry used the beige, black, red, and white tartan-derived pattern as a lining fabric from the early twentieth century, initially because it was distinctive enough to verify authenticity and catch counterfeits. A private mark. For most of the century you only saw it if someone opened their coat, which gave it a quality closer to a hallmark than a logo. Its migration outward onto the surface of products was gradual. The licensing era of the 1990s and 2000s, when the check appeared on an enormous range of products simultaneously, overexposed it badly. The subsequent effort to pull it back under control is part of the brand's more recent and considerably more complicated history.

Why Archive Burberry Matters: The Story Behind Pre-Owned Pieces

Pre-owned Burberry is a different category from pre-owned pieces from brands whose history is primarily visual. The check pattern on a canvas bag from the 1980s was originally designed as a lining material, for function rather than visibility. This means it carries a different kind of weight than a pattern conceived as a surface statement from the start. Knowing that changes how you look at it. Honestly, it changes how you carry it.

Switzerland has a long relationship with goods held for decades, passed between owners who understood what they had. Swiss buyers have consistently priced pre-owned Burberry above the European average, partly because British heritage resonates with Swiss ideas about material durability, and partly because the pieces genuinely hold up in a way that is not universal in vintage fashion. Gabardine trench coats from the 1970s and 1980s are still wearable, still structurally sound, still doing what gabardine was designed to do in 1879. The canvas bags, reinforced with leather trim, survive decades of daily use in a way that pieces built around a trend cycle simply don't. In Switzerland's growing conversation about sustainable fashion, that durability argument sits at the centre of things, not the margin.

Archive pieces also sit outside the licensing problem. A coat or bag produced before the check's overexposure carries the pattern at a different saturation, in a different context. It reads differently on your shoulder than it does on a current product designed around it as a primary visual. Less declaration, more discovery.

These similar stories of similar stories of luxury heritage are what connect great archive pieces across houses, like the Prada nylon rehabilitation, or, in the accessories world, like the Balenciaga City Bag. Knowing where something comes from changes how you wear it.

Shop Burberry Archive Pieces at Bloc Magasin Zürich

We carry a selection of genuine pre-owned Burberry at Bloc Magasin, sourced through trusted channels, at Flüelastrasse 16, 8048 Zürich-West. Stock changes regularly. Three current pieces give a sense of what's in.

The Burberry Check Printed Baseball Cap, priced at CHF 350.00, is made from 100% linen in the signature check, with a curved brim, paneled crown, embroidered eyelets, and an adjustable metal buckle strap. Made in Italy. Linen in the check reads lighter than the canvas versions, more summer-weight, with a quieter hand to the fabric that suits the season it's built for.