Dubious cakes, pants and toilets: celebrating knock-off “Berberry”

That distinctive pattern of beige, red, black and white has become so much more than a check. Over the past decade or so it’s become a signifier not of wealth and style, as its creators Burberry might have wished, but of a certain sense of cheeky reappropriation; of all things naff; of bonkers levels of market-trader eccentricity. Since its birth decorating the handbags of the rich and famous (here’s looking at you, Paris Hilton), Burberry tartan has found its way onto anything and everything, from cars to wheelchairs to toilet seats. This strange and rather charming phenomenon has been captured by Toby Leigh in his new book Berberry, a collection of photographs taken over the last ten years that show the baffling fakes on cakes, tattoos and entire apartment blocks.

“In around 2006 I started noticing there was a really grim ‘chav’ thing going on where people were vilifying white working class people, and Burberry became the symbol of it,” says Toby. “There was that picture of Daniella Westbrook and her kids in the tabloids all clad in it, it was very much in the public domain. I kept seeing the pattern everywhere and the more I collected it in photographs, the more my eye became tuned in to it.”

All but around five of the photographs in the book were shot by Toby, though the image of the building was the product of some drawn-out detective work to track down someone who spoke English and would take a photograph of the building in the town of Vranje in Serbia.

So what does Toby think resonated with people so much in the “Berberry” check? “It became the branding for that horrible tabloid obsession. I think it’s so simple and powerful from a design aspect – it can be tiny and appear on something like a lighter, or huge on a building. There’s nothing else really like that.”

Berberry is a very sweet and very funny tribute to what the publisher describes as “the global symbol of pseudo-luxury and faux British heritage.” In a beautiful denouement to Toby’s story, he even met a bunch of the people from real-life Burberry at the launch party. “I’d seen loads of people from Burberry ordering the book online, but I was a bit worried about it. I thought they might start throwing their weight around, but they were lovely.”