London, Sept. 24 -- Burberry closed London Fashion Week with a sun-washed rebuttal to cynicism, staging its Spring Summer 2026 runway as a British music-festival daydream translated into clothes meant for fields, pavements, and stadium queues. Inside an open-sided tent pitched in the gardens by Kensington Palace, models crunched across a sand and sawdust floor while a hard-rock soundtrack rolled overhead, and a sky-blue canopy turned every photograph into a postcard of imagined sunshine. The message was plain enough to read from the last row and sharp enough to hold up in the store: fewer layers, tighter lines, craft you can feel, and icons you can spot from half a block away.

The show also served as a tidy exclamation point on a busy we...