Burberry is telling its 170th-anniversary story through people, not just its archive. Unveiled on September 28, “170: The Anniversary Portraits” brings together 170 participants from London, New York, Seoul and Shanghai. Ten outerwear designs take on different characters through their wearers. For marketers, it is an interesting example of an anniversary working as a contemporary product story.
Four cities instead of one ideal image
According to Burberry’s announcement, Jack Day photographed the portraits and Hector Aponysus directed the film. Participants appear on the streets of their own cities. Local residents and employees join well-known figures from culture and sport, including Lila Moss, Nico O’Reilly, OG Anunoby and Ruthie Rogers.
Little Black Book also describes the combination of street casting and famous names and confirms the photography and directing credits. That distinguishes it from a campaign built around one ambassador: attention is distributed across many people, with clothing as the common element. The celebrity is not supposed to replace the product entirely.
Why limit the selection to ten designs?
The campaign includes Kensington and Waterloo trench coats and the Camden car coat, alongside variations in material and form. Burberry publishes the detailed selection in its announcement. What matters most to the advertising idea is the relationship: a relatively small set of shared pieces and many different ways to wear them.
Our editorial reading is that this constraint makes differences between participants more visible. If every portrait advertised a completely different item, the series could simply resemble a large catalogue. A recurring product creates a basis for comparison: the person, movement, styling and urban setting change, while the brand remains recognizable.
This also addresses a practical global-communications challenge. A single visual system can have local faces without becoming four unrelated campaigns. Still, photographing different cities does not prove that every audience will feel equally represented. That conclusion requires people’s responses, not merely a list of locations.
Brand history as an explanation of the current product
An anniversary can easily become a chronology of achievements that interests the company more than anyone else. Burberry instead connects its long history to a buyer’s present-day question: how would these clothes look on me and in my life? Portraiture offers several possible answers rather than one approved interpretation.
Including employees adds another layer: the story features people working inside the company, not only those recruited to represent it publicly. This can be read as a way to connect external advertising with internal culture. However, the available materials do not provide evidence for assessing this particular choice’s effect on sales or perceptions of Burberry as an employer.
What other brands can borrow
The practical principle is to start an anniversary with what the product means to people today, not with the company’s age. Even a small label can show one item in different everyday contexts, provided it has clear production rules, agreed image rights and genuinely different participant stories. The size of a series is no substitute for editorial selection.
Compared with Target’s invisible shopping bag, this is another way of working with a familiar brand asset: repeat it through different interpretations rather than remove it from view. And AAMI’s campaign with Kylie Minogue is a reminder that a famous participant needs a clear role. Burberry’s strength here is its shared product foundation; its actual effectiveness will require results that the announcement does not yet provide.
Photo: Mark Hillary / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Archival illustration, not a portrait from the new campaign. Resized for the web.
