The Drum | Can The Return Of Burberry’s Knight Rescue Fashion From A Fate Worse Than Death?
Emma Barratt, global executive creative director at branding consultancy Wolff Olins, details the impact of Burberry’s logo change and why it might spur other luxury brands to follow suit.
Under Daniel Lee, its new chief creative officer, Burberry has looked to its past for its new brand identity and, paradoxically, emerged more future-facing.
Burberry’s new serif logo, along with the brand’s equestrian knight symbol, marks a long overdue pivot in modern luxury branding. A world that has been dominated by a consciously blank minimalist aesthetic in recent years.
Under its previous creative figurehead, Ricardo Tisci, the brand adopted a Peter Savile-designed wordmark and a very modern interpretation of a heritage TB monogram. The reasoning behind this shift was that modern minimalism makes the brand more accessible and appealing to a younger generation of digital natives and the Chinese market in particular.
It didn’t hurt that the identity was well suited