Radio City Music Hall, 13 June 2010, and the 64th Tony Awards had a run of British names on the ballot. The one who walked up for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play arrived in a Burberry tuxedo.
Eddie Redmayne won for Red, John Logan’s two-hander about Mark Rothko and the murals the painter made, then refused to hand over, for a New York restaurant. Redmayne played Ken, the assistant: the character who grinds the pigment and asks the questions the audience would ask. The production took six Tony Awards that night, Best Play among them.
The tailoring was a fitted tuxedo, shirt and bow tie, all Burberry, as this magazine recorded it at the time. Christopher Bailey had been running the marque’s design since 2004 and took the title of chief creative officer in November 2009. That is the period in which Burberry’s evening tailoring stopped being an afterthought to the trench coat. A narrow shoulder and a high armhole on a very thin young actor said as much about the house that year as any campaign did.
Redmayne went on to a film career and to a long association with the marque. The suit belongs to one evening. That is the point of it: a first Tony, a play about a painter who could not let his work go, and a British house putting its own tailoring on the man collecting the prize.
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