The photograph is black and white, taken somewhere in Kensington in 1966

The photograph is black and white, taken somewhere in Kensington in 1966. A young woman stands in a trench coat, one hand in the pocket, the collar turned up against nothing in particular. The coat is Burberry's, the woman is Jean Shrimpton, and the image is so clean it could have been shot yesterday. That is the trick of the house: it builds clothes that photograph like ideas.

Burberry has never been short of women who could wear a trench coat and make it mean something. But three stand apart—not because they were the most famous, but because they clarified what the house was trying to say when the words weren't there yet.

Jean Shrimpton and the invention of effortless

Shrimpton did not invent the Burberry trench. She inherited it, the way you inherit a surname. By the time she appeared in David Bailey's lens in the mid-sixties, the coat had been standard issue for decades: officers, pilots, men who needed something that worked in weather. What Shrimpton did was strip it of context. She wore it over nothing, or over a slip dress, or with the belt trailing. She turned function into refusal.

The trench had always been about protection. Shrimpton made it about exposure. She was tall, thin in the way that registered as modern rather than frail, and she moved through Bailey's frames as though she had somewhere better to be. The coat became a gesture—not armour, but the idea of armour, worn by someone who didn't need it.

Burberry leaned into the shift. The house had spent the first half of the century proving that gabardine could stop rain. Shrimpton's work suggested it could stop time. She wore the trench in editorials that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with a particular kind of unreadable cool. The coat became shorthand for a woman who had her life sorted and wasn't going to explain how.

What mattered was not the garment but the carelessness. Shrimpton made the trench look like something you threw on because it was there, not because you needed it. That redefinition—from practical to inevitable—is still what the house sells.

Kate Moss and the return to England

By the nineties, Burberry had a problem. The check had escaped. It was on market stalls, on bootlegs, on people who had never been within a mile of Haymarket. The house had become famous for something it could not control, and the trench—still good, still selling—felt like a relic from someone else's century.

Kate Moss arrived in 2001, not as a solution but as a reset. She was English, which mattered more than it should have. She had come up through the same grey light as the brand, and she wore the trench the way Shrimpton had: as though it required no thought. But where Shrimpton had been clean and remote, Moss was rumpled. She looked like she had slept in the coat, or might.

The campaign imagery, shot by Mario Testino, was direct. Moss in a trench, hair undone, standing in front of nothing. The check appeared, but sparingly—a scarf, a lining, never the whole garment. Burberry was trying to remember what it had been before it became a logo, and Moss gave them permission to be plain again.

She stayed with the house for a decade. The work was not revolutionary, but it was clarifying. Moss made Burberry English in a way that felt specific rather than nostalgic. The trench became, once more, a coat you could wear in London without thinking about what it meant. That was the point.

Her influence was not in the images but in the aftermath. After Moss, Burberry could be pared back. It could reference its own archive without drowning in it. The house learned to treat the trench as a given, not a monument, and that shift—from icon to infrastructure—is still what allows the coat to work.

Naomi Campbell and the claim to now

Naomi Campbell has walked for Burberry more times than most people have owned a trench. She opened the Spring 2020 show, closed Autumn 2019, and appeared in the September 2022 campaign wearing a coat so sharp it could have cut the decade in half. She is not a muse in the way Shrimpton was, or even in the way Moss was. She is proof of durability.

Campbell's relationship with the house is less about a single image than about accumulation. She has worn the trench in every conceivable configuration: belted, open, over tailoring, over nothing, in black, in honey, in patent. She has made it look like evening wear and like something you grab on the way out. The coat bends around her rather than the other way around.

What Campbell brings is authority. She has been famous longer than some of Burberry's customers have been alive, and she wears the house's clothes as though she remembers when they meant something different. That is useful for a brand that is always trying to be both heritage and contemporary, never quite one or the other.

Her presence in recent campaigns is not nostalgia. It is a reminder that Burberry's trench works because it does not care what year it is. Campbell has worn it in three decades, under three creative directors, and it has looked correct each time. That is not about her—though she is very good at her job—but about the garment's refusal to date.

Where Shrimpton made the trench modern and Moss made it English again, Campbell makes it continuous. She suggests that the coat is not a moment but a constant, and that you can return to it the way you return to certain streets in a city you know too well.

What they share

None of these women needed Burberry. They were already famous, already working, already the kind of person a camera follows. What the house gave them was a frame, and what they gave back was clarity.

The trench is a simple garment—a storm flap, a belt, a double-breasted front—and it does not photograph as drama. It photographs as resolve. Shrimpton, Moss, and Campbell each understood that. They wore the coat as though it were the only logical choice, and that conviction is what Burberry has been selling ever since.

The house will have other muses. It will cast other women in other campaigns, and some of them will be very good. But these three did something harder than looking right in a trench. They made it impossible to imagine the coat without them, and then they stepped aside and let it continue.

That is the trick. The coat remains. The women move on. And Burberry keeps making the same thing, over and over, because these three proved it works.