A 170-year anniversary anchored in a single garment
On 2 March 2026 Burberry releases The Trench, Portraits of an Icon, a global campaign marking the brand's 170th anniversary and celebrating the trench coat as the structural product of the house. Photographed by Tim Walker as a series of black-and-white portraits, the campaign assembles 23 cultural figures across film, music, sport and fashion, each photographed in a Burberry trench coat and presented in the same controlled visual register. A documentary film accompanies the still photography, set to Sing by Blur and capturing unscripted exchanges between cast and crew.
The cast spans generations. Kate Moss appears alongside Kendall Jenner, Karen Elson and Erin O'Connor. Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jonathan Bailey, Matthew Macfadyen and Kristin Scott Thomas represent contemporary British screen acting. Little Simz, Kid Cudi, Hikaru Utada and J.Y. Park provide a global music register. The footballer Eberechi Eze and the tennis player Jack Draper carry the sport line, while the dancer Reece Clarke, the model Sora Choi and the actor Wu Lei broaden the geography toward East Asia and into classical performance.
What is being celebrated, and how
The campaign frames the trench coat as both object and symbol, an item of clothing whose function and image have been refined through what the press release calls quiet evolution. The product story sits behind every portrait. Daniel Lee, Chief Creative Officer, describes the campaign as a tribute to Burberry and to the skilled individuals behind every coat. Joshua Schulman, Chief Executive Officer, frames the trench as one of the most iconic signifiers of the brand and the campaign as a story of craftsmanship, innovation and authenticity.
The choice of black-and-white photography, and of Tim Walker as the principal photographer, is notable. Walker is more often associated with elaborate set construction and saturated colour. The reduction here, to monochrome and to a single garment per portrait, is a deliberate counter-position. The campaign argues that the trench coat does not need additional staging. The garment, the wearer and the light are sufficient.
The Heritage Collection and the Castleford site
The campaign anchors an expanded Heritage Collection of five trench and car coat silhouettes. The Kensington, Waterloo and Chelsea trench coats and the Camden car coat return. They are joined by the new Mayfair trench jacket, a cropped silhouette aimed at a more modern fit. Each piece in the Heritage Collection is made in England at Burberry's Castleford manufacturing site, where specialist tailors have produced Burberry rainwear for more than 50 years. The cotton gabardine has been engineered for crease resistance and is lined with a beige House Check. All fabrics, including the shower-resistant outer shell, are woven at the Burberry Mill in Keighley, Yorkshire. The main material and the body lining contain 100 per cent organic cotton.
Beyond the Heritage Collection, the campaign introduces the Fitzrovia trench and the Ellingham car coat, which add volume through wider sleeves and a fuller skirt cinched at the waist. Selected silhouettes are reissued in tropical gabardine, a lighter Burberry fabric developed for warmer climates, in soft pale sugar pink and stone beige for women and graphite grey for men.
Retail extension through windows and pop-ups
The campaign extends into stores worldwide through a programme of window displays and curated pop-up installations. Each space combines product display with large black-and-white portraits from the campaign, producing a gallery-like environment in which the trench coat is presented alongside the people who have worn it for the campaign. Pop-ups appear at Regent Street in London, Isetan Shinjuku in Tokyo, Lotte Main in Seoul and 57th Street in New York.
The retail dimension matters because it converts the editorial work into a sales surface without changing its tone. The product is the campaign, and the campaign is the product. There is no parallel discount programme, no competing visual treatment in store, no separate creative track for commerce. A customer encounters Tim Walker's photography on the shopfront, on the pop-up walls and in the editorial pages of the trade press in the same week.
Where the campaign sits in Daniel Lee's tenure
Daniel Lee's appointment as Chief Creative Officer in 2022 reversed the Tisci-era visual identity in early 2023, restoring the Equestrian Knight Design and a serif wordmark. The 2024 campaign It's Always Burberry Weather, photographed by Alasdair McLellan, established outerwear and the British landscape as the centre of his creative programme. The 2025 chapter, Postcards from London, moved the proposition into the city through John Madden's films with Olivia Colman.
The Trench, Portraits of an Icon is the third campaign in this sequence and the first to take the brand's anniversary as its narrative anchor. The 170-year frame allows the brand to make a claim that few of its competitors can match, and the cast of 23 cultural figures supplies the contemporary register that prevents the anniversary from reading as a retrospective. For brandvelle, the campaign is interesting as a controlled meeting between heritage and contemporaneity, in which the product remains the same trench coat that Thomas Burberry's gabardine made possible in 1879, and the conversation around it is rebuilt for a 2026 audience.
Source: Burberry Youtube
