Burberry Partners with Leeds Beckett University to Back the Next Wave of British Designers

Burberry has announced a formal partnership with Leeds Beckett University’s BA (Hons) Fashion Design course. It builds on a pilot that ran in 2024 and marks the first time the two institutions have committed to an ongoing, structured relationship.

The Yorkshire connection is worth knowing about. Burberry has manufacturing sites in both Castleford and Keighley, as well as a Leeds office. The Heritage trench coat, the garment at the centre of this year’s student brief, is produced at Castleford. So when second-year students presented their redesigns there in February, they were not doing a field trip. They were standing in the room where the thing they had just reconstructed was actually produced, week in and week out.

The brief was titled Reinventing the Trench: A Study in Craft and Form. Students were given surplus gabardine, the weatherproof fabric Thomas Burberry invented in 1879, and asked to redesign the Heritage trench coat from the ground up. They worked within real constraints: a specific material, a specific silhouette, and a garment with 147 years of decisions already baked into it. The brief ran alongside Burberry’s ‘The Trench, Portraits of an Icon’ campaign, which marked the brand’s 170th anniversary, and the students’ work was judged by Burberry colleagues at the Castleford site itself.

Two winners were selected from the second-year cohort. Juliet Skaife took the Judges’ Choice award for The Jetty Trench, working from 1970s silhouettes as her starting point and reimagining the coat’s proportions through that decade’s sense of ease. Her version retained the gabardine but pushed the structure somewhere looser, less defined at the shoulder, and more relaxed through the body. Riyna Khan won the People’s Choice for The ReVe Brontë Trench, built around the visual world of the Brontë sisters and 19th-century women’s dress. Where Skaife went forward in time, Khan went backward, looking at how women moved and dressed in the period when Thomas Burberry was first developing the coat. Both students will complete work experience at Castleford.

Final-year students worked differently. Rather than a set brief, they received mentorship from Burberry colleagues focused on their own graduate collections. The showcase took place at Leeds Beckett’s City Campus Fashion Studio in May, with work judged by Burberry’s manufacturing teams. The Burberry Award for exceptional work across the cohort went to third-year student April Charlesworth, who received an embroidered gabardine certificate and a paid internship at Castleford.

Alexandra McCauley, Burberry’s Chief People Officer, said Yorkshire has long been central to the brand’s story, and that investing in regional talent today is how the house works to secure the future of British craftsmanship and manufacturing. The sentiment is not new for Burberry, but the partnership gives it a more specific shape than a campaign or a press statement can. 

Sam Hudson-Miles, Course Director for BA (Hons) Fashion Design at Leeds Beckett, pointed to the live brief format specifically: working with a brief of this kind, he said, pushes students to develop their own design voice while getting genuine insight into how the industry actually operates. For a course that sits outside London, where proximity to major houses and their hiring pipelines is not a given, that kind of direct access carries weight that is difficult to replicate through curriculum alone.

Brand-university partnerships in fashion tend to range widely in what they actually deliver. A loose theme, an internal panel, a certificate. This one required students to make real decisions about a coat with a defined history and a defined material, using surplus fabric from the factory where that coat is still made. Skaife’s 1970s proportions and Khan’s Brontë-centered construction are both harder to arrive at than responses to an abstract brief, because the constraints are harder to ignore.

Burberry has leaned into its British manufacturing story with increasing consistency since Daniel Lee’s appointment as chief creative officer in 2022. The Castleford and Keighley sites have come up repeatedly in that context, in campaigns, in press materials, and in the brand’s broader communications around craft. Putting Leeds Beckett students inside those sites, working with the same gabardine, is a more concrete version of that commitment than a campaign. How many of them end up working in the industry through routes like this is a question that takes years to answer. For now, they have had access to something most fashion undergraduates do not get until much later, if at all.