Isabella Burley

Isabella Burley is a British editor and creative director whose career developed through retail, magazines and independent publishing. She worked at Dover Street Market as a teenager, moved into fashion journalism and joined Dazed, becoming editor-in-chief in her twenties. Her editorial work combined emerging fashion, art, photography and youth culture with a strong interest in archives and printed matter.

Helmut Lang appointed Burley its first editor-in-residence on 13 March 2017. The role gave her authority across the digital relaunch, campaign commissioning, cultural projects and selected product initiatives. She invited Shayne Oliver to create the Spring/Summer 2018 guest collection, developed the Re-Edition archive-linked releases and assembled the year-long Seen By Artist Series. Her tenure was designed as a finite editorial intervention, and she was outgoing by January 2018 before Alix Browne took over in February.

Burley later moved into a senior creative role at Acne Studios and founded Climax Books, an independent publishing and book project focused on rare, transgressive and culturally specific material. Across these roles she has used editing, commissioning and publishing as ways to build a brand world around people, images and objects.

Burley’s authorship is editorial and curatorial. She builds a creative frame by choosing collaborators, images, archival material and publishing formats, then lets each contributor retain a distinct voice inside a larger identity.

At Helmut Lang, this method created several parallel strands: a new campaign and digital presence, archive-linked Re-Edition product, the artist releases and Shayne Oliver’s one-season fashion residency. The clothing authorship remained with the invited designer and internal teams; Burley shaped the conditions through which those projects met the public.

Her later publishing and brand work follows the same logic. Books, photographs, ephemera and subcultural references are treated as active cultural material, with selection and context providing the connective structure. The result is a form of creative direction grounded in editing and commissioning.