London after dark was the thesis. Slick streets, streetlamps, taxis slicing through the city as Daniel Lee rebuilt Burberry’s world inside Old Billingsgate and sent it out into the night. The clothes were glitched classics and liquid satin, leather shining like petrol on pavement. The casting had to match that voltage.
“The brief was international,” Anita Bitton says. Not just geographically, but energetically. London as a collision point. London as shared rhythm. On the runway, that translated to a lineup that felt global and generational at once: Sora Choi with her razor-sharp presence, Edie Campbell’s insouciant cool, Nora Attal’s quiet force. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley brought polished authority; Romeo Beckham, a fresh ease. Karly Loyce, Felice Noordhoff, Kit Butler, Libby Bennett. A cast that looked like the city actually does, only heightened.
Bitton interpreted the house vision through beauty, but not the fragile kind. This was beauty with backbone. Clean, confident, deliberate. Faces that could carry a shearling trench or a leather tux without disappearing inside it.
The energy she wanted was simple: strength. “Strength and humor,” she says of what feels right for Burberry now. Not stern, not aloof. Strong enough to hold the room, funny enough to enjoy it.
As for cohesion versus individuality, Bitton chose both. Individuality first, always, but anchored in confidence and joy. Different walks, different attitudes, one shared pulse. You could feel it in the room: everyone going somewhere, everyone lit by the same imaginary streetlamp.
See below for exclusive polaroids of the casting.
