Key takeaways
- British brands are are converting a clearly defined national identity into measurable commercial results. Burberry returned to pre-tax profit in FY26, Mulberry narrowed its losses sharply and achieved positive EBITDA for the first time in years, Barbour posted 9% revenue growth across every international market, and M&S recorded its strongest financial performance since 1997.
- The appetite for Britishness is global. Burberry’s strongest quarterly growth in FY26 came from Greater China and the Americas, markets where a heritage identity built on craft, landscape, and creative eccentricity travels precisely because it cannot be replicated.
- In a market defined by tariff uncertainty, margin compression, and shifting consumer confidence, knowing exactly who you are is a strategic advantage.
Three things happened at London Fashion Week this September. Marks & Spencer stepped onto the official schedule for the first time in its hundred-year history. Mulberry returned to the runway under a new creative director, posting revenue growth and its first positive EBITDA in years. And McQueen came home to London after twenty-five years in Paris.
Now, although these are three different stories, I believe that they are better understood as one: a statement about Britishness, about what it means commercially and culturally in 2026, and why some of Britain’s most established names are betting on it all over again.
What the numbers say about British brands
The figures across four quintessential British brands — each at a different point on the market spectrum — point in the same direction.
Burberry swung to a pre-tax profit of £49 million for the fiscal year ending March 2026, from a loss of £66 million the year before. Comparable store sales rose 2% for the year, reversing a 12% decline in fiscal 2025, and accelerated to 5% in the final quarter. The strategy was a straightforward return to basics — outerwear, scarves, the check — after years of attempting to reposition the brand toward ultra-luxury. CEO Joshua Schulman described fiscal 2026 as “a meaningful inflection point.”
Mulberry has faced its own share of commercial turbulence in recent years. At least until recently. Revenue rose 4% to £125.5 million in its last financial year, with retail and digital like-for-like sales up 9% and gross margin improving from 67% to 72% through stronger full-price discipline. The reported pre-tax loss narrowed sharply from £32.2 million to £8.9 million, and the business achieved positive underlying EBITDA for the first time in years. In the first thirteen weeks of the current financial year, group revenue was up 23%. The decision to appoint Christopher Kane as creative director and return to London Fashion Week is being made from a position of improving commercial health.
Barbour never really lost its footing. Revenue rose 9% to £350.8 million in the year to April 2025, with operating profit up 14.1%. Growth came from every international market, and clothing and accessories now account for almost half of total sales; a category extension the brand has managed without diluting its core identity.
Then there is Marks & Spencer, marking 100 years in the fashion industry. The retailer posted a 58% increase in underlying pre-tax profits to £716.4 million for the year to March 2024 — its strongest financial health since 1997, by its own reckoning, with 12 consecutive quarters of growth across food and clothing. Its decision to debut at London Fashion Week in its centenary year was not a publicity exercise. A brand in that financial position does not need one.
What Britishness means as strategy
These numbers raise a legitimate question: what, exactly, are these brands selling when they sell Britishness?
Helen Brocklebank, CEO of Walpole, the body that represents British luxury commercially, addressed this directly at the RLC Leadership Series in London. Britishness, she argued, has always needed to function as a commercial argument, not merely a cultural one. “If you are a brand like Mulberry or Rolls Royce Motor Cars,” she said, “your Britishness is a huge asset emotionally as well as commercially. You must lean into it.” On what that looks like in practice: “What has been successful about brands like Mulberry and Burberry right now is a real clarity of strategy. They’ve worked out who they are, why people love them, and then they are absolutely delivering that iconic product, extraordinary craftsmanship, and creativity back to the customer in a way that feels relevant for now.”
The asset Brocklebank describes is not abstract. Britishness carries a remarkably specific and globally legible vocabulary of associations; one that took centuries to build and that no competitor can manufacture from scratch. It is the aristocracy and the monarchy, yes, but also the Cotswolds in October, the waxed jacket and the wellington boot, Savile Row tailoring, tweed, the English country house and its garden, Royal Ascot, the equestrian aesthetic. It is a tradition of craft — Church’s shoes, Johnstons of Elgin cashmere, Gieves & Hawkes suits — and of a particular kind of creative eccentricity that runs from the punk movement and Vivienne Westwood back through history.
The brands that have struggled in recent years are, in many cases, the ones that tried to step away from this inheritance in pursuit of a more generic global luxury positioning. Those recovering are precisely the ones returning to it. Not as nostalgia, but as the foundation for a coherent present and future. The challenge, and the opportunity, is to embrace, expand and modernize that identity rather than treat it as a constraint.
A global identity
The appetite for British brands is not a domestic story. Barbour’s revenue growth in the year to April 2025 came from every international market. A brand built on the English countryside, the waxed, barn jacket, and a very specific idea of British rural life is finding commercial traction in markets thousands of miles away, because what they are buying is the illusion of it.
Burberry’s clearest evidence came in the final quarter of fiscal 2026, when comparable store sales rose 10% in both Greater China and the Americas, markets where the return to heritage codes, the trench coat and the check, resonated more strongly than any generic luxury repositioning had managed in the years before it.
There is a logic to this. Britishness is one of the few national identities that travels as a complete, coherent aesthetic system with its own codes of craft, landscape, class, and even eccentricity that are globally legible and genuinely difficult to imitate. In markets where consumers are choosing between luxury propositions with similar price points and comparable quality claims, a brand with a clearly rooted identity offers a differentiation that no marketing budget alone can construct.
Britishness: Why now?
The timing of this renewed interest in Britishness is not accidental. The broader context in which these brands are recovering and doubling down on who they are is one of considerable pressure from multiple directions: tariff uncertainty, shifting consumer confidence, an unpredictable cost base across key markets, margin compression across the luxury sector. In that environment, clarity of identity is a critical asset.
What Britishness offers, in that moment, is a framework that works across both time horizons. The associations are already built. The codes are already globally legible. The craft traditions are already there. What most brands have understood is that the work is not to invent a new identity but to recommit to an existing one, albeit with enough creative conviction to make it feel fresh and interesting.
