He wasn't the first elaborately costumed star to tear through Claridge's at an indecent hour - Kate Moss famously spent her The Beautiful And Damned-themed 30th here - but he may have been the most inconspicuous. Picture it: not yet 9am, and into the hotel's expansive lobby clanks a man in full medeival knight regalia, while a brass band plays carols and a Golden Retriever hoovers errant fries from burger carts during the grand unveiling of this year's Christmas tree by Burberry's Daniel Lee.
"Being invited to design the Claridge's Christmas tree is a huge honour," says the Bradford-born designer, who could be found overseeing the production well into the early hours the (k)night before. "Claridge's is my favourite hotel in London, a symbol of elegance and charm." And charm really is the word: Lee's 16-foot fir, drenched in 600 purple, flaxen and aquamarine bows made from surplus Burberry fabrics, stuffed with thistles, glass baubles, brass bells, and surrounded by throws, cushions and chess pieces, feels like a happy deviation from the conceptual contortions that have previously taken up space. John Galliano created a porcelain-white menagerie in 2009, Karl Lagerfeld an upside-down spruce in 2017, and Burberry's Christopher Bailey a triangular structure of metallic umbrellas in 2015. Lee's vision, by contrast, seems transported from the grand country piles that inspired his autumn/winter 2025 collection, where the retrievers are plump and the walls lined with suits of armour.
"The whole idea behind the show came, initially, from London's 'weekend escapees'," Lee said back then, less than an hour before sending Lesley Manville, swathed in velvet brocade, down a Tate Britain runway. "Those who live and work in the capital and escape to the beautiful English countryside to breathe the fresh air, take long walks and disengage." But it was tonight's party where that scene came most to life, with a grab bag of national treasures - Jennifer Saunders, Richard E Grant, Karen Elson, Alexa Chung - drifting about the place like eccentric aunts and uncles sprung from the family attic, while some editors turned up in pyjama shorts and slippers, as though they'd just padded down from whichever turret bedroom Lee had allocated them for the night. And then there were the requisite branded touch points: a pop-up shop, doormen, old-school train trolleys groaning with penny sweets, key cards, lifts - and every other available surface - decked in Burberry check.
And, of course, no charmingly dysfunctional Christmas is complete without its, in this case, Negroni-stoked, speeches. Olivia Colman, for one, gathered more than 500 guests in Claridge's foyer and reading room for an ode to the season. "I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion, but would you mind putting your phones down?" she said, launching into a self-authored riff on 'Twas the Night After Christmas. "Now we'll feel Christmassy together." If that sounds at all kitsch, the holidays are a time for fashionably unfashionable quantities of schmaltz.