A coat built to survive trench mud and gunfire is about to spend four months behind glass, in a room the museum once used to store its own textiles in mahogany cabinets. The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon opens September 21 in the V&A's Prince Consort Gallery, marking 170 years since Thomas Burberry patented the waterproof gabardine the coat is still cut from. The collar alone is built from eight parts and requires up to two hundred stitches — a construction detail no one is meant to notice on a coat worn to keep dry, laid open here for inspection under gallery light.

Two hundred stitches, none of them meant to be looked at until now.

Nineteen runway versions spanning twenty-five years, credited to Christopher Bailey and Daniel Lee, sit beside a trench that belonged to Savile Row's Hardy Amies, on public display for the first time. Brand curator Carly Eck has called it a chance to show archive pieces that have never left storage; V&A senior curator Oriole Cullen put it more plainly, noting the coat "continues to evolve over a century on."

The gallery is the sharper detail. Before this, the room held the museum's own textile collection, cabinets of cloth nobody was meant to see up close. It hasn't changed function. It has simply swapped which cloth it's keeping.