Burberry presents Postcards from London with Olivia Colman

A film about a city, told through one actor

On 8 October 2025 Burberry releases It's Always Burberry Weather: Postcards from London, the second chapter of a campaign platform first introduced in autumn 2024.¹ The new chapter consists of four short films directed by John Madden, the British filmmaker behind Shakespeare in Love, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Operation Mincemeat.¹ The Academy Award winning actor Olivia Colman plays a series of London characters, including a cricket enthusiast and a woman behind a chip-shop counter, encountered by first-time tourists exploring the city.¹ The films culminate in a fast-paced edit that interweaves moments from each vignette and showcases Burberry's outerwear range.

The campaign's photography is by Drew Vickers.¹ Daniel Lee is credited as Creative Director, with artistic direction by Lane & Associates.¹ The cast of tourists features the international supermodels Amelia Gray, Liu Wen, Lucky Blue Smith, Mona Tougaard and Tyson Beckford, each photographed in a defined Burberry silhouette.¹ Olivia Colman wears the Castleford trench coat in beige across her appearances.¹

How the campaign extends an existing platform

It's Always Burberry Weather was launched in October 2024 as an outerwear-led campaign photographed by Alasdair McLellan, anchored on the British landscape and on the brand's heritage of weatherproof tailoring.^{2, 3} Postcards from London moves the same proposition into a metropolitan setting and into a more narrative form. Where the original campaign was photographic, the new chapter is cinematic. Where the original was rural, the new chapter is urban. The continuity sits in the underlying argument: Burberry exists for British weather, and the brand's coats are designed for the country and the climate that produced them.

The decision to use a single actor playing multiple characters carries strategic weight. It allows the campaign to portray London as a city of recognisable types without resorting to generic stock characters, and it frames the trench coat as the constant element across these types. The chip-shop assistant, the cricket fan, the bus passenger and the post office customer all wear Burberry. The brand becomes the unifying visual element, while Olivia Colman's performance carries the narrative work.

Outerwear at the centre of the proposition

The campaign anchors a defined outerwear range produced for autumn and winter 2025. The Castleford trench, made in Yorkshire from water-resistant cotton gabardine, returns alongside the new Fitzrovia coat with an A-line silhouette and the relaxed-fit Chestwood trench drawn from a 1980s Burberry archive piece.¹ The Berryhill car coat introduces a fit-and-flare proportion in down-filled construction.¹ The Floriston jacket reinterprets the quilted jacket in shiny nylon trimmed with corduroy.¹ Heritage shapes such as the Kensington trench are cut from technical brushed cashmere, and the Belmont trench cape rebuilds the rainwear vocabulary in wool.¹

The colour palette extends Burberry beige into softer registers of clam and ice, while introducing earthy clay browns, coal greys, deep mahogany and twilight blue.¹ The check appears in wine red for women and truffle brown for men, integrated into puffer jackets in corduroy.¹ Each garment is staged with a defined cast member, allowing the campaign to function simultaneously as narrative film and as look book.

Pop-ups, retail and a restored clock

The campaign extends into retail through a programme of heritage-inspired pop-up installations across China, Japan and Korea, including ticket booths and gifting kiosks designed to echo station platforms.¹ The references draw on Thomas Burberry's role as an early supporter of British railways and on the Winter 2025 show, whose set blended industrial architecture with Arts and Crafts detailing under Daniel Lee's creative direction.¹

The most pointed heritage gesture sits at Horseferry House, the Burberry headquarters. The 1930s clock from the brand's flagship Haymarket store, removed during a 2015 refurbishment of the Grade II listed building, has been restored by horologists in gold leaf, cast iron and German opal glass and reinstalled at the headquarters.¹ Replicas of the clock appear in selected pop-ups.¹ The detail is small, but it tells the audience and the trade press that Burberry's contemporary marketing programme is being run with the brand's archive in plain sight.

For brandvelle, Postcards from London is interesting because it operates as a deliberate evolution rather than a reset. Burberry continues to use Britishness, weatherproof outerwear and cinematic storytelling as its three load-bearing themes. The 2025 chapter swaps countryside for city, photography for film and a roster of models for a single major actor, but the underlying brand argument is unchanged. In a luxury sector that has spent the past decade rotating between provocations and retreats, Burberry's commitment to a consistent thematic frame, sustained across multiple campaigns, has become its own form of differentiation.