Burberry launches Wrapped in Burberry for its 170th year with Pierce Brosnan and Fiona Shaw hosting at Longleat House

Key Takeaways

• Burberry announced Wrapped in Burberry, its 2026 festive campaign subtitled Celebrating 170 Years, on 3 November to mark the house's 170th anniversary.

• Pierce Brosnan and Fiona Shaw host the film, directed by Harmony Korine at Longleat House in Wiltshire, with guests including Cara Delevingne, Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union and Wu Lei.

• The range centres on cashmere, including a Kensington trench coat and a House Check scarf in more than 40 colours, alongside Burberry's first Smythson collaboration.

• Shoppers can visit The Cashmere Shop and festive windows in stores, with complimentary embroidery of up to five initials or icons and complimentary gift wrapping.

Burberry has launched Wrapped in Burberry, its 2026 festive campaign, which marks the British fashion house's 170th anniversary by installing Pierce Brosnan and Fiona Shaw as hosts of a Christmas party at Longleat House in Wiltshire. The film, subtitled Celebrating 170 Years, was directed by filmmaker and artist Harmony Korine, whose credits include writing Kids and directing Gummo and Spring Breakers. Korine has worked in fashion before, having directed and photographed a Gucci tailoring campaign in 2020.

The party sits at the end of an anniversary year that has so far been spent largely celebrating trench coats, in portraits and in a museum, so the festive campaign is where all that history has to be wrapped up and sold. Burberry has therefore built the story around a family gathering, with cashmere as the main material and personalised gifts as the main service. The film also arrived nine days before Burberry publishes interim results on 12th November, which will show how its turnaround is holding.

Burberry's Wrapped in Burberry film sends Pierce Brosnan and Fiona Shaw to a Longleat House party

The film opens with Shaw inviting guests to the house, while Brosnan, her co-host, sits in a living room with a newspaper and seems unenthused by the commotion. Around him, presents are passed along, and a disco ball is installed, as the guest list arrives in the form of Cara Delevingne, Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union, Dylan Brosnan, Kim Min-ha, Nico Parker and Wu Lei. Wade and Union play golf in matching Burberry, and the day moves through countryside walks, party games and golf buggy races before a finale set to Sylvester and Patrick Cowley's Do You Wanna Funk. Brosnan eventually concedes and dances with Delevingne. Emma Thynn, Marchioness of Bath, also appears, which is a fitting cameo since Longleat is the historic seat of the Marquess of Bath.

Daniel Lee, Burberry's Chief Creative Officer, explained the idea plainly when he said, "We wanted to celebrate 170 years of Burberry with a proper party. Family, friends, great gifts and everyone dressed up." The great gifts are led by cashmere, as the Kensington trench coat now comes in a lightweight brushed version, while cashmere capes and sweaters with Knight embroidery sit beside it. The House Check cashmere scarf is made in Scotland and available in more than 40 colours, including the new Blackwatch Check, and the bags include velvet vanity cases. Children get mini gabardine trench coats, and dogs have not been forgotten either, since the range extends to knitted check sweaters and bandanas.

Wrapped in Burberry follows last year's 'Twas The Knight Before as comparable sales rise 5% under Burberry Forward

The commercial logic goes back to Burberry Forward, the plan Joshua Schulman presented in November 2024 as newly appointed Chief Executive Officer, when the company refocused on trench coats and scarves and leaned on its British heritage after admitting, "Over the past several years, we moved too far from our core with disappointing results." Daniel Lee, who joined as Chief Creative Officer in October 2022 after serving as Creative Director at Bottega Veneta from 2018 to 2021, predates that plan, and his campaigns now carry its message. Schulman said in May that the aim is "to consistently communicate Timeless British Luxury through immersive storytelling juxtaposing heritage and innovation," and he went further when he said, "So clearly, the marketing has been a signature factor of our turnaround." A Wiltshire stately home party directed by the man behind Spring Breakers fits that formula rather literally.

Lee's festive work has also grown steadily more theatrical, starting in 2023 with a still life campaign led by animals, including a beagle and a family of ducks. In November 2024 Burberry used the Wrapped in Burberry name for social media portraits in Bloomsbury featuring David Tennant, Alex Hassell and the artist Slawn with his family. Last November it moved to a scripted short film with John Madden directing 'Twas The Knight Before, in which Jennifer Saunders hosted Naomi Campbell, Ncuti Gatwa, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Son Heung-min at a London townhouse, and Lee said, "It's a party invitation for family and friends, with some great ideas for gifts." The 2026 film keeps that invitation and that monogramming offer while moving the party to a considerably larger property.

Burberry's own figures explain why festive gifting matters so much to the plan, as comparable retail sales grew 3% in last year's festive quarter, when Chief Financial Officer Kate Ferry said the campaign "drove strong engagement across our channels", and half of scarf purchases were personalised. Cashmere's prominence has a similar explanation, because Schulman said the range had sold out and promised a much-expanded assortment. The financial year to March 2026 brought adjusted operating profit of £160m, up from £26m, and comparable retail sales rose 5% in the 13 weeks to 27th June, led by the Americas at 12% and Greater China at 9%. The interim results will cover only the 26 weeks to 26th September.

A V&A display on the trench coat runs until 3 January 2027, and Burberry and Smythson's first joint collection, whose notebooks carry weather phrases such as "Come rain or shine," turned the same British preoccupations into gifts before the film appeared.

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter