Burberry's seasonless clothes usher in fashion's stream-of-consciousness era

September show breaks with arcane structures of fashion week, putting clothes online and on the catwalk simultaneously

When Virginia Woolf wrote the fantastical biographical novel Orlando, she broke all the rules of time and gender. The protagonist lives for four centuries but ages just 36 years; halfway through, with no explanation, he switches from being a man to a woman.

Orlando was Christopher Bailey’s starting point for Burberry’s show, a link more fundamental than the way in which this season’s Cavalry women’s jacket recalls the handsome boy-prince costumes worn by Tilda Swinton in the 1992 film.