Christopher Kane Brings Provocation Back to Mulberry
Kane’s first collection as Mulberry creative director joins the house’s leather heritage with a distinctly industrial vision of British style.
Christopher Kane has returned to the London fashion calendar with his first collection as creative director of Mulberry, reconnecting two British names that were prominent fixtures of the city’s fashion scene about 15 years ago.
Titled “Town, city, country”, the collection placed Mulberry’s leather and Bayswater heritage inside Kane’s more provocative visual language. Leather sheath dresses and car coats appeared alongside bags, postman’s-lock loafers and shoes with miniature axe-shaped heels.
Kane said the collection drew on the bleak, post-industrial Scotland of his childhood, with grey concrete, coalminer orange and soft plaid checks shaping its palette. His stated aim was to express a Britishness that was not London-centric — a useful repositioning for a house now focused on Britishness and craft under a new chief executive.
The appointment also gives Kane a major platform after his label entered administration in 2023, when the pandemic severely affected independent designers. Mulberry, meanwhile, had faced misfired price increases, a takeover bid and plunging profits.
The Guardian reported that Mulberry’s sales rose 23% in the first quarter of this year, attributing the figure to the company’s reporting. Kane’s arrival brings a sharper fashion proposition to that recovery, while his adaptation of the Bayswater’s castellated leather flaps into notched hems and necklines turns a familiar house signature into a new design vocabulary.
