Burberry Turns the Page.

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Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times.

LONDON — The first show in the next stage of Burberry’s life as a brand took place on Monday 

in the former environs of a once-famous bookstore at the top of Charing Cross Road, just past 

the theater where “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” was playing to standing-room only crowds.

Down a cobbled side street, through a garden bursting with grasses and plaster statuary — Grecian busts and monumental muscled legs — lay what the brand had christened Makers House, a petting zoo 

of craftspeople making things (tassels and patchwork and statues and such). There also was a room 

collaged with fabric swatches and sketches referencing the decorator Nancy Lancaster and Virginia 

Woolf’s novel of gender-bending and time travel, “Orlando,” all in homage to the designer Christopher Bailey’s inspiration for his collection, shown just upstairs in rooms lined with chintz-covered benches: 

the first see-now/shop-now, combined men’s-and-women’s line in Burberry history.

Even though a handful of brands in New York Fashion Week had offered the same (Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, among them) Burberry had announced its new schedule first, in February, 

and this was its statement of ownership. The brand was changing not just its timeline, but its level of transparency. It was inviting the public into the process.

On Tuesday, the day after the show, the space would be open to the public, including a pop-up shop displaying hot-off-the-runway Burberry merchandise, all of which was already for sale on the brand’s website. And cars would be idling outside, waiting to take shoppers to the flagship store on Regent 

Street, in case they wanted to satisfy greater consumer urges than could be met in the small space.

“We’re changing everything,” a brand spokesman said before the show. “The schedule and the venue 

and how we interact with consumers.”

Even, a little, the clothes. And for the better.

Working with a limited set of high-touch variables — striped silk pajama dressing, floral plissé cotton 

voile, shearling aviator and braid-bedecked martinet jackets, high-frilled white cotton shirts, loose

 pleated trousers, tapestry jacquard — Mr. Bailey mixed and matched and belted and bunched, for

 man or woman no matter. (Both sexes carried the same saddle bag.) Think not boyfriend dressing,

 but girlfriend dressing, a closet-raiding role reversal most associated with Gucci, but now ubiquitous. Romantic poet met Oxford don met hippie landed gentry in a contemporary hodgepodge of glossy

 surfaces and slouchy attitude. Such luxury nonchalance takes an awful lot of effort to do well.

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