Burberry isn't a nostalgia brand, it's a heritage brand

CNN — London (CNN) — How can a 170-year-old brand feel modern? The answer may lie in understanding the difference between building on heritage versus leaning on nostalgia.

At the Burberry show on Monday night — the final event on the London Fashion Week calendar — Britain's oldest luxury fashion brand, under the creative stewardship of designer Daniel Lee, showed it can still build.

The new collection, created in collaboration with the exuberant, swinging sixties textile designer Celia Birtwell, featured happy prints: embellished and texturized floral motifs of bright yellow mimosas and twisting vines jazzing up the bright white box tent outside the Chelsea College of Arts. Silhouettes were slouchy, and washed silk and cotton fabrics made the clothing feel fresh and easy to slip into. These clothes are meant for spring, so the practicality of the Burberry brand was rendered though layered looks that offered the agility needed to live through three months of April showers.

With Birtwell's influence, the classic and sometimes harsh Burberry check was made more gentle, closer to a subtle gingham. But she also introduced some more off-kilter fun with a series of looks featuring garish, smiley faces dug up from her own archive.

Backstage after the show, Lee talked about how buying is about chasing a feeling. We don't need a mimosa-adorned shift skirt, after all, but we might really want one. A luxury garment is "not a necessity product," he said. "It's an emotional thing," explaining that he wanted clothes to look worn and imperfect this season. Softer interpretations of the trench were ruched, pouffed and purposefully wrinkled.

The 40-year-old designer is part of a whole class of millennials working for historical fashion houses who have been tasked with making young shoppers feel things. The designers and brands succeeding right now appear to be those who understand how to honor history and invigorate the brand, without being held back or weighed down by legacy.

Matthieu Blazy (42) is doing this in the most refreshing and exciting way at Chanel. Jonathan Anderson's (41) Dior is also working because he understands how to triangulate historical curation with modern design and artful references. Ultimately, the heritage brands that are selling clothes, offer you reliable provenance while also making you excited for what's to come. Matthew Rider (45) at Celine gets it, too, and there's a lot of interest in what 35-year-old Grace Wales Bonner will do with menswear at Hermès when she shows her first collection for the luxury French house next year.

Issues arise when brands and their designers can't figure out how to move beyond their heyday. Perhaps this is why beloved '90s nostalgia brands like McQueen and Calvin Klein (both with sliding revenues) aren't resonating as well. It's difficult to separate McQueen from the genius of its founder Alexander and his tragic death. The task of respecting that important chapter in fashion history while driving the brand forward may be an impossible one. Choosing to leave Paris and show in London, as the brand did this season, made sense and certainly generated excitement. But it's unclear if the collection did more than give Londoners and McQueen loyalists a nostalgic night out. Calvin Klein, meanwhile, has struggled to keep a firm enough grasp on its own heritage and narrative. Calvin Klein wrote the playbook on a form of minimalism that other designers like the Row, Khaite and Toteme arguably do better now, reducing the brand to a reference on Carolyn Bassette-Kennedy moodboards.

But with campaigns romanticizing the British countryside and a new mini exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum honoring one of its greatest hallmarks, the trusty trench, Burberry is fully owning its history. It's also true that Lee and the team around him are thinking about how to weave some surprises and a little delight into well-made utilitarian staples. It's this combined approach which is making more people want to buy the clothes (retail sales are up 5%, which in a challenging luxury market isn't nothing) and making a very old brand feel young.