02 Jun 2021
Our ambition is to inspire and excite highly influential luxury consumers, fostering a strong Burberry community. When the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to host runway shows in person, we harnessed our creativity to reinvent this key inspiration moment. We pushed boundaries to create online experiences that gave front row seats to the Burberry community around the world.
Spring/Summer 2021 womenswear show
For our Spring Summer 2021 collection, In Bloom, we teamed up with influential livestreaming platforms to broadcast the show online and reach a wide audience.
We invited internationally acclaimed artist Anne Imhof to collaborate on the show experience, creating a unique event set in a forest that played with rules and rebellion. The collection’s inspiration was a modern mythology, a contemporary fairy tale in the deep ocean, a love story blooming between a mermaid and a shark, darkly romantic and unexpected. Like waves crashing uncontrolled against the shore, the performance featured bodies, ebbing and flowing, models and performers as one. Artist and musician Eliza Douglas provided a unique real-time soundtrack, further exploring the boundaries between art, fashion and live performance.
In China, the show was featured on Tmall as part of Alibaba’s Super Brand Day. In advance of the event, our branded activity on Tmall included a livestream with a brand ambassador and broadcasting video collaborations with dancers from the hit show “Street Dance of China”. In the three days before the show, our on-site activity gained over 20 million comments, likes and shares. On the day, the show was watched live by 28 million viewers on the platform, while Burberry’s Tmall store saw a record high in daily transaction volume.
In the rest of the world, we became the first luxury brand to partner with the livestreaming platform Twitch. Erykah Badu, Rosalía, Steve Lacy and Bella Hadid started the event with a pre-show conversation. During the show, we used Twitch’s Squad Stream function to enable our virtual guests to view the collection from multiple perspectives and share their impressions via the chat function in real time.
Autumn/Winter 2021 menswear presentation
For our Autumn/Winter 2021 collection, Escapes, we streamed the presentation from our Regent Street store.
Riccardo Tisci’s first Burberry collection focused on menswear, the presentation celebrated the relationship between humanity and nature, and referenced Burberry’s heritage of exploration.
The store was reconfigured as a meandering terrain. Models followed different paths, reflecting the myriad of directions creativity and exploration can take.
Video camera operators offered alternative perspectives on each of the looks, from detailed closeups to wide-angle views. We shared the presentation online and afterwards posted images of the collection on Burberry.com. In doing so, we replicated the sense of intimacy that a presentation creates for a wide audience and built a sense of community among viewers who could share their reactions to looks via chat functions.
