Burberry's Next 170th-Anniversary Campaign Swaps the A-List for the Actual List

Burberry has already spent this anniversary year on a campaign built around famous faces: "The Trench, Portraits of an Icon," unveiled in March, put Kate Moss, Kendall Jenner, Kid Cudi and twenty other names from film, music, sport and fashion in Tim Walker's black-and-white portraits. The follow-up announced September 28, "170: The Anniversary Portraits," keeps the black-and-white portrait format but drops the guest list almost entirely: of the 170 people in it, most are street-cast locals and long-serving Burberry employees, some with more than 45 years at the house.

The people who do carry a name are a different mix than a fashion campaign usually reaches for: singer Crush, theatre director Jamie Lloyd, model Lila Moss, editor Lisa Love, Manchester City and England footballer Nico O'Reilly, NBA forward OG Anunoby, chef Ruthie Rogers, ballet dancer Tan Yuanyuan, film director Xin Shuang and athlete Yeonkoung Kim. Photographer Jack Day shot all 170 on the streets of London, New York, Seoul and Shanghai, each wearing one of ten Burberry outerwear styles — the same coat or puffer reading differently depending on who has it on — with Hector Aponysus directing the campaign's accompanying film.

Burberry's own framing points back to 2009's "The Art of the Trench," the site where the house invited the public to submit their own photos in the coat — an early, unusually democratic piece of digital marketing for a luxury label, years before brands treated user photos as a campaign asset. Putting employees and locals back at the center, rather than exclusively borrowed celebrity, reads as a direct callback to it.

The timing lines up with where Burberry actually needs the attention. CEO Joshua Schulman's turnaround has leaned hardest on outerwear as the category the house has the most authority in and the least excuse for under-selling, and the brand's fiscal 2026 results credited outerwear with outperforming across every region it sells in. A campaign that puts ten different coats on 170 different bodies, in four cities, is a bigger swing at making the case for the category than one Tim Walker sitting with two dozen celebrities.

It also lands a week after Burberry closed London Fashion Week by handing its check to textile designer Celia Birtwell for the same 170th-anniversary push — a show built to prove Daniel Lee's design changes could still move product while a museum hung the archive next to it. This campaign is doing the quieter, further-reaching version of the same job: less a runway moment than a reminder, city by city, that the trench and the coats around it are still what the house is for.