Burberry turns 170 and leads with its most famous silhouette. Tim Walker photographs Trench 170 campaign in high-contrast black and white, trading his usual fantastical staging for empty space and analog grain.
Styled by Katy England, the campaign puts actors Jonathan Bailey and Matthew Macfadyen alongside footballer Eberechi Eze, musician Kid Cudi, Royal Ballet principal Reece Clarke, Chinese actor Wu Lei, Thai actor Bright, tennis player Jack Draper, and music executive J.Y. Park, each in either the double-breasted Kensington trench or the Camden car coat. Walker’s palette pares both to proportion and line.
Burberry Trench 170 Campaign
Walker is the unexpected choice here. His reputation was made on saturated color, elaborate tableaux, and the occasional taxidermied animal. Burberry gives him one silhouette, and he plays it clean. The compositions are portrait-tight, most cropped at the chest or waist, and the grain runs heavy enough to feel analog. Matthew, arms folded with a pigeon on his head, gets the single moment of Walker whimsy, and the bird only makes the rest of the campaign look all the more controlled by comparison.
The gabardine itself does substantial work at this proximity. With Walker’s camera close, every storm flap, epaulet, and buckle strap becomes legible as architecture. Bailey pulls the Kensington collar up to his jaw. Eberechi, shot in profile with the collar high on the back of his neck, turns the same coat into a different shape entirely, the yoke cutting a clean diagonal across his shoulder.
Park grips both his lapels over a striped shirt, and the proportional difference between his frame and Bailey’s inside the same garment is the campaign’s entire thesis. Clarke, in the campaign’s only full-length image, flings both arms out in the Camden car coat over pinstripe trousers. The lighter gabardine catches air mid-stride, and the effect looks like rehearsal footage, the coat billowing behind him in a shape that belongs only to a dancer’s body.
Kid Cudi, by contrast, leans into frame in a long Kensington buttoned to the chest, one hand raised to his chin, the trench’s skirt falling straight and heavy below the belt. The two images, placed side by side, prove what the campaign argues by repetition: the silhouette fits every body, and every body refits the silhouette.
Wu Lei, shot with the Kensington slung over one shoulder, treats the trench as a prop draped for effect. Bright wraps himself in his, arms crossed, collar popped to the jawline, the gabardine occupying the entire frame.
Draper, hair wet and the cotton gabardine spattered with water droplets, gets the most physically charged portrait, the trench open over a check shirt in a tight crop. A century and a half on, the trench holds its line, a constant worn and reworked and still very much in play.
