Riccardo Tisci’s Burberry debut shocked London fashion week in the one way no one expected.

An audience braced on Monday for Tisci’s trademark brand of catwalk scandal – men in dresses, women in sideburns, cars on fire, breasts bared – were confronted instead with sublimely elegant, Parisian-accented chic. Knife-pleated skirts were worn with blazers, high-waisted trousers with scarf-print blouses, and everything with neatly coiffed ballerina buns and high-heeled court shoes.

And then, just when the audience were getting comfortable with this seductive haute-bourgeois new vision for Burberry, the aesthetic was flipped upside down and a contrasting look took over: zippered mini skirts, metal-trimmed anoraks, with stompy flat shoes and harsh winged eyeliner.

Check please … high-waisted trousers and bold print. Photograph: Pixelformula/SIPA/Rex/Shutterstock

The biggest surprise of all was that it was the first section – the serene, ladylike pieces – that stood out as the winning look. Tisci, fashion’s favourite rebel, turns out to be a dab hand at Hermès-esque chic, to which he adds a hefty dose of sex appeal. A leather pencil skirt with a chiffon underlay, fluid black evening gowns suspended from delicately glinting metal straps, a leopard-spotted skirt over a slim leotard and a tailored trench dress had the audience seduced.

Models present creations from the Burberry Spring/Summer 2019 collection, during a catwalk show. Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images

“Burberry is such a big part of British style. It is like the flag of England,” he explained, adding that he focused on tailoring because “I was the first one to do streetwear on the catwalk – and now I think fashion has got too street.”

The changing of the guard at Burberry is the most significant reshuffle to happen to British fashion in years. Burberry is the biggest, most powerful, homegrown fashion brand, which means its new designer has the power to change the weather over the whole of the UK fashion landscape.

British designer Christopher Bailey. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

In 17 years, Christopher Bailey had so steeped Burberry in his Yorkshire-rooted, romantically nostalgic vision of Britishness that few in the industry could imagine the house in a different guise. For 12 of those years, Tisci was at Givenchy, where he remade a house founded on the gamine charms of Audrey Hepburn as a byword for darkly gothic glamour.

The twin pillars of the house of Burberry are the trench coat and the house check. Both were given starring roles in this debut. (Backstage the designer described himself as “obsessed” with the trench coat.) Trench-beige dominated the colour palette, while the check – sometimes pared back to a stripe – appeared on bags and blouses, or glimpsed as a lining.

Tisci described the collection as “a celebration of the cultures, the traditions and the codes of this historic fashion house and of the eclecticism that makes up the beautifully diverse United Kingdom”.

A model wearing black and ‘trench-beige’. Photograph: Pixelformula/SIPA/Rex/Shutterstock

He had hinted at a punk take on Britishness with his early choice of collaborators. In the run-up to the show, he tapped up the iconic graphic designer Peter Saville, best known for the album sleeves he designed for Factory Records, including Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and New Order’s Movement.

His counter-cultural leanings made Saville an intriguing person to Tisci to task with reframing Burberry. Saville described the monogram he designed, based on the initials of the house founder Thomas Burberry, as “an identity that taps into the heritage of the company in a way that suggests the 21st century cultural coordinates of what Burberry could be”.

Model Kendall Jenner wears a creation by Burberry. Photograph: Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP

December will see the release of a limited-edition Burberry collection designed with Vivienne Westwood, whom Tisci reveres. “Vivienne Westwood was one of the first designers who made me dream to become a designer myself,” he said when the collection was announced. “She is a rebel, a punk and unrivalled in her unique representation of British style.”

There was added pressure on this debut because Burberry have been battling a firestorm of negative publicity in the wake of revelations that £28.6 million worth of unsold product was destroyed last year. The policy – designed to guard prestige by making sure Burberry products did not get marked down or languish unsold – backfired dramatically, sparking outrage for being environmentally irresponsible.

Marco Gobbetti, who joined Burberry as CEO last year, swiftly issued an apology and announced an immediate end to the policy. “Modern luxury means being socially and environmentally responsible,” he said. The company also announced that it will no longer sell real fur.