To mark 170 years of Burberry, the house is doing what legacy brands do best when they want to remind you who they are: cutting through the noise and returning to the one piece that has carried its name through wars, trends, and entire generations — the trench coat. In the 25 Gramos piece, Burberry’s anniversary celebration is framed as a retrospective told through a single garment: the gabardine-born coat first associated with founder Thomas Burberry in the late 19th century, now reaffirmed as the brand’s most enduring signature.
That celebration takes the form of a campaign titled “The Trench: Portraits of an Icon”, led creatively by Daniel Lee and shot by Tim Walker. The concept is deliberately stripped back: black-and-white portraits, a neutral backdrop, and almost no visual ornamentation beyond the coat itself — a setup that turns the trench into both object and attitude, while letting each subject’s presence do the styling work.
The cast is where the campaign aims for cultural range rather than fashion-only validation. According to the article, the faces include Kate Moss, Kendall Jenner, Little Simz, Jack Draper, Kid Cudi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Jonathan Bailey (among others) — spanning music, film, sport, and fashion’s own inner mythology. The trench becomes a kind of shared uniform: same silhouette, wildly different energy depending on who’s wearing it and how.
Beyond the portraits, the broader message is that Burberry is leaning into a year of heritage storytelling — not as nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s-sake, but as a way of reinforcing craft, British identity, and the trench’s role as a global signifier. Burberry’s own framing positions the project as part of a wider anniversary celebration of the house’s archiveand history, using the trench as the cleanest, most instantly recognisable shorthand for what the brand wants to represent right now.
Photos: Daniel Lee / Tim Walker