Kate Winslet Smiles Through the Rain in Burberry’s New Summer Campaign
LONDON — Burberry is on a cinematic streak with a summer 2025 campaign featuring big British names including Kate Winslet, Nicholas Hoult and Jodie Turner-Smith, all of whom get drenched, at some point, in rainy London.
“It’s Always Burberry Weather: London in Love,” breaks Wednesday — 48 hours before Valentine’s Day — with seven short films and a series of static images. It’s a follow-on from the celebrity-filled winter campaign, and has a similar message: Never leave home without your Burberry rain gear.
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“It’s about humor, optimism and, of course, the unpredictability of our great British weather,” said Daniel Lee, creative director of the campaign, which also features Richard E. Grant, David Gandy, Son Suk-ku and Naomi Campbell, who falls for a knight in full armor.
Chief executive officer Joshua Schulman, who’s been taking Burberry back to basics, said the campaign “celebrates uniquely British wit and style, and the serendipity that anything is possible in a Burberry trench.”
Schulman added that Burberry is “building on the warmth, humor and unique spirit” of its two most recent winter campaigns, “which resonated with a broad range of luxury customers and led to an improvement in brand desirability.”
He said the acceleration of the brand’s core outerwear and scarf categories in the key third quarter “reinforces my belief that Burberry has the most opportunity where we have the most authenticity.”
Schulman, who joined Burberry last year, has been working on winning back traditional customers, accenting Burberry’s strengths in outerwear, and tweaking price points to appeal to a broader audience.
His strategy has quickly gained ground.
Burberry performed better than expected in the third quarter, the key holiday trading period. The company attributed the uptick in sales to a number of factors, including a focus on scarves, outerwear, core products and “recognizable brand signifiers.”
While this latest campaign may be brimming with famous names, the star of the show is the gabardine trench, Burberry’s best-known product.
Created by Thomas Burberry in 1879, gabardine is shower-resistant, lightweight, breathable — and built for the country’s cold, wet weather.
The trench appears in all seven films, which were inspired by the British rom-coms of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In one, Winslet is pictured walking down a street lined with pastel town houses, similar to the ones in “Paddington,” “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually.”
She’s speaking on the phone to her partner, and contemplating a house swap holiday. But she’s loathe to leave London. “I’d miss the rain,” she says, popping open her Burberry check umbrella to shelter from an unexpected downpour.
Winslet also does the voiceover in another short, proclaiming that “Life isn’t just about sunny days,” and “True love only happens in the rain.”
Grant, meanwhile, uses a Burberry check umbrella to shield his little dog Thomas, named after the company’s founder, while Gandy — clutching a humble bouquet of blue roses — gets drenched as he waits in vain for a lover to arrive.
In another short, Campbell ends up sharing a cab with a knight in full armor, a nod to Burberry’s historic Prorsum logo. Initially confused, the model eventually warms to her travel companion, and rests her head on his silvery shoulder.
As with the earlier campaign, Burberry is planning related window displays and in-store activations that riff on the trench, and the theme of romantic rain.
Burberry store interiors will feature wisteria and pastel blossoms, and lime-washed cladding meant to reflect the shades and textures of Lee’s latest runway collection.
The new ads feature the heritage trench and car coats made from various weights of gabardine woven at the Burberry mill in Keighley, Yorkshire, and lined in Burberry check cotton.
They also draw on new styles designed by Lee, who worked trench elements and signature checks into his spring 2025 collection, which was shown at the National Theatre in London.
Looks included a little capelet with silky feathers at the neck, deconstructed drummer boy jackets, cool safari suits, and fluttery dresses and skirts in taupe, tangerine or smoky blue.
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