Central Cee kept the hood up the whole way. The London rapper made his runway debut at Burberry’s Summer 2027 show on Monday (Sept. 21), the last show on London Fashion Week’s official schedule, in a crinkled two-tone nylon jacket and jeans slung low enough to show off a pair of Burberry check boxers. Burberry has made a habit of saving a famous Brit for its runway, Dazed points out, with actors Richard E. Grant, Jason Isaacs and Lesley Manville among the recent cameos. This season it was Cench’s turn.
He was hardly a stranger. He has fronted Burberry campaigns and sat at its London shows before, Complex notes, and earlier the same week he was in the front row at Fashion East for Traiceline Pratt’s label GOYAGOMA. This time the benches belonged to his peers. Skepta, Kano, Jorja Smith and Tems watched alongside Jonathan Bailey, Jason Statham, Romeo Beckham and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, on wooden seats printed with the house check, as Reuters described the room. Hypebae called the walk “a perfect blend of old and new Burberry.”
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The clothes were made for living in, not for looking at. Daniel Lee described the season as “a return to the basis of things” and built it around Celia Birtwell, the textile designer who helped define British fashion in the ’60s and ’70s. At 85, she helped make this what Highsnobiety called the brightest show of London Fashion Week. Mimosa and lavender flowers were embroidered over windowpane-check skirt suits, florals covered checked short suits for men, and the menswear borrowed from the street with trouser chains and denim, Reuters reported. Birtwell also drew new face motifs that Dazed likened to proto-emojis. As Lee put it in the collection’s press release, nothing was “overly pressed or pristine.”
There’s an intentional imperfection: the idea of owning a piece, living in it. You can really feel the human hand in it. In the check, in the lines.
Daniel Lee, Burberry’s chief creative officer, in the collection notes, Hypebae
As always, Lee scored the show with one artist’s catalog. After FKA Twigs last season and Black Sabbath the season before, it was David Bowie: four decades of him, opening on the instrumental deep cut “Abdulmajid” and ending on “Ashes to Ashes” instead of “Heroes,” one of fashion’s most-used finale songs, Dazed noted. Hypebeast read the whole collection as Burberry easing up on its sartorial codes, with Cench’s look anchoring a run of more casual pieces. Watch the full show below.
The show landed in Burberry’s 170th-anniversary year, and the house is marking it in a museum, too. The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon, a free display of archive pieces and 19 runway looks from the past 25 years, including designs by Lee and Christopher Bailey, opened at the V&A in South Kensington the same day. It runs until Jan. 3, 2027, according to FashionUnited.
- Show
- Burberry Summer 2027
- Date
- Sept. 21, 2026
- Venue
- Chelsea College of Arts, London
- Soundtrack
- David Bowie, from “Abdulmajid” to “Ashes to Ashes”
Sources
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.
