Check your coat: How six creatives wear a classic Burberry trench

Like jeans and a white T-shirt, a classic Burberry trench is never out of fashion. With new colourways and silhouette variations, there’s a style for everyone. Here, six creatives wear theirs on their own terms.

CARLA URIARTE

Carla Uriarte wears many hats. The artist, designer and mother is also the co-owner of Sydney’s beloved Cafe Freda’s, home to Abstract Thoughts Gallery, a space dedicated to championing up-and-coming creatives. With such varied tasks each day, her wardrobe must be up to the challenge: “Being that I am constantly in motion creating art, working in a professional setting, or running after my child, I need my clothes to be comfortable while still giving that chic, 32-year-old cool girl mum energy,” she says.

“I need to be able to move, dance or run at any given moment.” Cue, the Burberry trench.

Uriarte has plenty of achievements to her name, but her daughter remains her greatest pride and inspiration. “Being a mother has been my biggest achievement as my daughter has introduced a life of patience, gratitude and love,” she says.

The qualities her daughter has brought out in her extend into the other aspects of Uriarte’s life, too. “My current self is more patient and moves slower,” she says. “I’m not trying to win a race but instead trusting the process and the beauty in the every day.” She’s ultimately learnt the value of “giving myself time and patience to be consistent with my expression, whether through artworks, design or creating expressions through ambience and curation”, she says. Looking towards the future, Uriarte hopes to support burgeoning creative minds, albeit slightly differently to how she does now at Freda’s: “In the next decade, I want to open a school on a farm,” she says.

SERWAH ATTAFUAH

The digital visual artist and musician Serwah Attafuah’s NFTs have caught the attention of major players in the international art world, including Paris Hilton. Based in Western Sydney (Dhuarg land), Attafuah creates what she calls “cyber dreamscapes and heavenly wastelands populated with Afrofuturistic reflections of self”. (Afrofuturism depicts African diaspora culture fused with science-fiction and futuristic elements.) Hilton commissioned Attafuah via Instagram DM to create an NFT, titled Aether: Galaxy Goddess, which she then auctioned off through Sotheby’s digital marketplace for US$20,160 (about $26,000).

Alongside her multidisciplinary art practice, Attafuah also plays “death metal, black metal and extreme styles of music on guitar” and has written and released three albums with NASHO and Dispossessed. The latter’s Warpath Never Ended was nominated for an Australian Music Prize in 2019.

Attafuah’s musical leanings heavily influence her style, which she mixes with staples such as the Burberry trench. “I customise my clothes to show off the bands I love and to give my style that darker edge,” she says. “I’m a big futurist too, so I try to pick out pieces and silhouettes that feel very bleeding edge.”

Creativity is at the fore of Attafuah’s life, yet she doesn’t believe in mastering a craft. “To me, it’s more about the journey,” she says. “I love to learn new things and evolve every day.” Despite her incredible success, she is happy to take the milestones as they come: “I’m not a big planner when it comes to achievements,” she says, “but I’m just working towards making more meaningful art and music on an even larger scale.”

GEMMA CHUA-TRAN

In Netflix’s Heartbreak High, Gemma Chua-Tran played the pink- haired Sasha So, a (mostly positive) walking gen Z stereotype. The Australian show spent three weeks in the streamer’s global top 10 TV shows and reached top 10 in more than 43 countries, yet Chua-Tran remains humble and grounded. Their main goal: to maintain their “kitchen appliance hoarder” status, which has seen them purchase a duck-themed toaster oven: “My pride and joy.”

If the actor and sometimes photographer seems more relaxed than you’d expect of someone so early in their career, it’s because they are comfortable in front of a camera and open to learning as each new experience presents itself. “Acting is such a thing where I know I will just continue to learn and grow and discover new things,” Chua-Tran says. “And that’s such an exciting prospect.”

Chua-Tran has already taken away a lot from their experience in the industry — including style cues. “Being able to play different characters with such diverse costume design really allows me to consider clothes out of the general realm of my personal style,” Chua-Tran says. “I’ve been so lucky enough to attend shoots like these with brilliant stylists. I’ll always try to take note of what they pull and put together.”

As a result, Chua-Tran’s style has become an eclectic mix of colours and silhouettes. “With the Burberry trench being such a classic staple, I would brighten it up with a mishmash of brighter items,” they add. “A football jersey, a pair of tights and lace-up dance shoes — nothing that really makes sense together but is a lot of fun.”

BRIDGET GAO HOLLITT

If Bridget Gao Hollit could tell her younger self how she’ll turn out, she wouldn’t lead with being an actor, musician or model. “I’d say, ‘I’m the most powerful witch I’ve ever been,’” she says.

Hollitt’s affection for the bizarre permeates her life and her style, which is why, for this shoot, she played with doubling the coats and wearing one backwards. “I like to make beautiful things just a little weird,” she says by way of explanation.

Hollitt also harbours a fascination with the intersection of humanity and technology — cyborgs, in particular, which she muses on in the song “Algorithm Defined Fantasy Girl” from her recently-released debut EP, how was that for you.

For inspiration, she looks to “incredible god-like women in music who have taught me the importance and power of living with as much design on the outside as you do on the inside”, she says, referencing Karen O, Kate Bush, Björk, Laurie Anderson and FKA twigs. “I try to be more like them every day.”

She is striving to achieve a holistic level of creativity: “I think when you master a craft, it becomes a lens through which you see everything,” she says. “Then you can create anything because everything is included. You don’t have to leave anything out.” That said, when it comes to her goals, she has just three: “I hope to find a way to procreate with an AI, I’d love to go post-physical, and to meet Tilda Swinton.”

BEBE BETTENCOURT

As an actor, Bebe Bettencourt is no stranger to playing dress-ups — it’s something she counts herself lucky to be able to do “all the time”. The rising star has worked alongside some of Australia’s most successful actors, including Eric Bana in 2020’s The Dry and Chris Hemsworth in 2022’s Spiderhead. In 2021, she starred alongside Sophie Wilde in the Stan series Eden.

“I’ve learnt so much about myself and my body through the characters I’ve played and through collaboration with truly incredible costume designers,” she says, adding that for this shoot, she relished the idea of “[playing] around with different decades and fashions of the past”.

Bettencourt says she is prepared to experience all the ups and downs that come with carving out a career on the screen. “I think you have to remain open and embrace failure,” she says. “There are so many different perspectives to gain knowledge from. I don’t think learning and growth ever stop.”

Artistic expression is in Bettencourt’s genes. Her father, Nuno Bettencourt, is, among other things, best known as the lead guitarist for the band Extreme, while her mother, Suze DeMarchi, fronted the band Baby Animals before going solo. Growing up, BeBe lived between Sydney, Boston and Los Angeles.

If she were to speak to her younger self, she would “tell her that I’m still figuring it out, but life is pretty magical and I get to do the thing we love … To be able to reach people, to make them feel — whether it’s good or bad — is a privilege to me,” she says.

“Life is an achievement, and I try to celebrate the little things and the big things! I just hope to continue surrounding myself with love and doing what feels fulfilling.”

YEMI SUL

Olivia Oluwayemi Suleimon — better known by her Nigerian nickname, Yemi — is a DJ with a penchant for urban and Black genres such as dancehall and Afrobeat. She’s also worked in documentary filmmaking, has a production company called Freckle TV and is a model. But for her, going down the “multi-hyphenate creative” pathway wasn’t necessarily an active choice, she explains. “As a millennial coming up in the age of perpetual technological change, mastering a single craft has not really been an option afforded to me … I got savvy.”

Coming out of university with an arts degree and experiencing the subsequent curse of “endless interning with no real promise of a job”, Suleimon quickly learnt the value of throwing aside the rulebook of how things should be done in favour of mapping out her own journey. “The only way to really make it in your chosen field is to do it yourself,” she says. “Mastering multiple things at the same time is my way of forging my own path.”

Her self-described “jack-of-all-trades” mentality has influenced every part of her life, including her style, where her dabbling in music, fashion and film provides endless inspiration. A certain nostalgia for the ’90s, when she grew up, also plays its part. She calls upon ’90s off-duty supermodels, the baggy jeans and mini-tee combos of R’n’B groups and rappers of the decade, even “It girl actors in rom-coms”. Comfort is also key: “I love to be the most dressed down person in the club, especially as the DJ. I see it as a flex … I’m not there to impress anyone but myself,” she says. A mix of streetwear and luxury designers is the perfect formula for her ideal ensemble: “It gives effortless and I’m booked and busy energy.”

This article originally appeared in the June/July issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia/New Zealand. Get your copy here.

Hair by Richard Kavanagh and Amiee Hershan, both at DLMAU; makeup by Nisha Van Berkel at AP-Reps, Isabella Schimid at Assembly Agency, and Kristyan Low at DLMAU. Cinematography by James Anderson.