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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.

The risk of the see-now/shop-now strategy, as was apparent in New York, is that it can drive designers to the most banal common denominator: pieces they know will sell because they have sold before. It can foster creative short-termism, the death knell of clothes that challenge the status quo and demand time to seep into the mind and reshape identity. To his credit, Mr. Bailey did not give in to that particular commercial temptation. If not exactly subversive or conceptual, and undeniably repetitive, the collection still had depth. A silk bathrobe coat might look like an easy purchase (certainly that’s what the brand is hoping), but there were layers, literal and metaphorical, involved.

In the past, Mr. Bailey has sometimes seemed to lean too heavily on the more superficial Burberry shtick — the trench coat, the Bloomsbury floral frock, the studded biker jacket — repeating it season after season until it began to have the outdated appeal of the Xerox machine. Maybe it was rethinking the logistical proposition; maybe it was his recent decision to step down from a combined role of chief executive and chief creative officer to become president and chief creative officer, the better to focus on products; maybe it was the tension in trying to reconcile “the beauty of craft” and a time “when change is everything and speed is everything,” as he said backstage. But whatever the reason, it proved energizing.

People might rush out to buy the collection, and there were lines inside the Regent Street store when the show ended, not unlike the lines that pop up when, say, H&M releases one of its limited-edition collaborations, but the irony is, they probably would have waited for it, too.