What Does Britishness Look Like When 170 People Get to Define It?

Burberry is celebrating 170 years by putting ten pieces of outerwear on 170 people around the world

Burberry has spent much of the modern era trying to answer a deceptively difficult question: what exactly does Britishness look like?

Sometimes the answer has been aristocratic, sometimes rebellious. It has moved through country estates, London streets, music scenes, football culture, rainy weather, royalty and the trench coat that somehow manages to belong to all of them. Burberry's relationship with British identity has never really been about establishing a single definition. Its difficulty, and occasionally its strength, has been that Britain itself refuses to provide one.

For its 170th anniversary, the house could easily have produced the usual heritage campaign. Open the archive, photograph a famous face in a trench coat, remind everyone that Thomas Burberry founded the company in 1856 and allow 170 years of history to do most of the talking.

Instead, The Anniversary Portraits puts ten Burberry outerwear pieces on 170 people photographed across London, New York, Seoul and Shanghai. The participants include established cultural figures alongside people drawn from creative communities in each city. The clothes remain remarkably consistent while the people wearing them change.

That reversal is what makes the campaign interesting. Burberry isn't introducing another interpretation of Britishness from the top down. It is allowing its most recognizable objects to leave Britain altogether and seeing what happens when other people inhabit them.

THE CELEBRITY ISN’T THE WHOLE STORY ANYMORE

Luxury has spent decades building campaigns around individual faces. Find the actor, musician or model capable of embodying the desired version of the brand, photograph them beautifully and let their cultural capital do the rest. The relationship is deliberately controlled. The celebrity doesn't simply wear the product. They temporarily become the personification of the house.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that model, and fashion is hardly abandoning celebrity. But alongside it, another kind of brand mythology has been growing. Houses increasingly want communities, casts and creative networks. They want campaigns that appear inhabited rather than simply endorsed.

Burberry's 170 portraits push that idea unusually far. No single person is being asked to explain what Burberry means. Instead, repetition does the work. The same outerwear passes between different ages, professions, cities and cultural contexts, allowing the identity of the garment to remain recognizable while everything surrounding it changes.

For a heritage house, that is a useful proposition. History can easily become restrictive when every campaign is expected to protect a perfectly managed image of what the brand has always been. A community campaign loosens that control. The house provides the object, but the wearer contributes some of its meaning.

BRITISHNESS DOESN’T HAVE TO STAY IN BRITAIN

There is also something clever about celebrating one of Britain's most recognizable fashion houses in Shanghai and Seoul alongside London. Burberry's history may be British, but its contemporary existence is global. Pretending otherwise would reduce heritage to geography.

The trench coat is particularly useful here because it has already escaped its origin story. What began as functional British outerwear has spent generations being adopted, styled and reinterpreted far beyond Britain. It can carry the mythology of the house without requiring the person wearing it to perform Britishness.

That may be the more interesting version of heritage in 2026. A brand doesn't necessarily demonstrate its strength by controlling every interpretation of its identity. Sometimes longevity is demonstrated by the opposite: creating something recognizable enough to survive reinterpretation.

There is, of course, a contradiction in presenting a carefully cast, professionally photographed global campaign as though a community has spontaneously defined the brand for itself. Burberry still chose the people, the cities, the clothes and the images. This is participation within a meticulously constructed frame, not a surrender of authorship.

But the shift in emphasis still matters. After 170 years, Burberry doesn't particularly need another campaign explaining what a trench coat represents. It might be more revealing to watch what happens when the house stops insisting on a single answer.

Perhaps Britishness was never something Burberry needed to define perfectly. Perhaps its most enduring contribution has been creating clothes capable of carrying it somewhere else.