Fragments Nº21: Doing The Lambeth Walk
Social channels as playpens, Stone Island's global subcultures, and the lost art of the extended jam.
There’s something incredibly frustrating about being ill (sick).
Like everyone else in the western hemisphere, Covid/Flu/Noro/Cold-combo-of-the-post-pandemic gods got me, and it wipes you out. If I owe you an email, I’m on it. If there are people reading this that owe me emails (and I know you exist), it’s February. Make a birthday boy happy.
Last week, I wrote about why the Medieval style is suddenly all the rage for excellent Brands & Culture. They’re hosting a wonderful conference in April. You can sign up for tickets here. Read my article here. Thanks, B& C team!
Onto the Fragments…
The Social Playpen
I’ve been no stranger to advocating for the Burberry revival over on that there Linkedin. Maybe to the point of myopia. But my belief was always centered on the brand's inherent ability to tell, or at least celebrate, British stories and people through their products. This was true in the pre-Joshua Shulman era (the Lewis Hamilton Burberry tie-up especially), and is even more true in this new ‘Burberry Forward’ era.
The brand’s creep back towards near-positive sales growth globally is clearly down to a clear, well-communicated business strategy that understood how product, merchandising, retail, wholesale, com, logistics, operations, and marketing (et al.) had to work together to deliver.
Spoiler: it wasn’t just a brand issue. All the parts had to find their harmony and speed.
However, by its nature, marketing had to take the burden first. A Charge of the Light Brigade back into the fray.
Luckily, “It’s Always Burberry Weather” delivered what our fateful Crimean Hussars could not - a win. That win extended from the films, casting, and the irresistible peculiar social content. Tea drinking as a form of social experiment. It could be understood on two levels. It is a strange social-first experiment and an exploration of the British psyche without having to spell it out. A classic case of X & Y content.
That out-of-the-gate success immediately jolted the brand—a rare double win. Creative marketing types loved it, and business commercial types understood it as very, explicitly Burberry—a light in the darkness. They know the way. Its success gave the rest of the business the time and space to implement the rest of the plan.
(Oh, the power of good marketing… )
But Burberry hasn’t stopped there. Quietly turned itself into an exciting testbed of modern social reorientating a brand on the fly. Less a copy-and-paste ‘best practice’ toolkit, instead developing a playpen for high-quality creative experimentation that’s serving distinctive business needs simultaneously.
This playpen approach has three key attributes:
Creative (physical) craft explorations of the brand.
Surprising editorial casting (centered around a broad but tangible sense of Britishness).
Experimental testing (notably with AI) through heritage archives.
The playpen works across product-focused moments, seasonal events, category influencers, and foot traffic generators, always with the Burberry check and supporting assets as the work's backbone.
The results have so far seen the brand create:
Stop motion films by Huw Massie using the Burberry check scarf to drive retail foot traffic.
Kids playing the Burberry name on various instruments
Stop motion Holiday illustrations by Vivkie Hietlin
Handweaved Burberry check baskets by Qian Lihuai for the Chinese Lunar New Year.
The ‘Portraits’ series, which starred six widely different voices and faces of Britain, was filmed in London last month.
This, in particular, caught my attention because while it’s been accused of being a little too similar to ‘Community As A Form of Research,’ it's a critical distinction from that exemplary campaign (as evidenced below) is the grounding of the casting in London. A truth no better embodied by ‘Grime Gran’.
When I initially spoke about the lining of Lewis Hamilton’s Burberry jacket at the Met Gala, the type of story Grime Gran represents was precisely what I meant and exactly who I didn’t imagine. Grime Gran is LONDON, through and through. But it is through her TikTok account (with Grandson Beau Keefe) that she’s brought that personality to life. It’s culturally relevant (ala Marc Jacobs) and peculiar. Especially to outside London-ears. Sweary, full of broad cockney accents, but authentic. (Like below…)
As a fifth-generation Londoner whose family grew up in East London (yes, within the sound of the Bowbells, AKA true Cockney), it’s refreshing to see not just Richard Curtis’-style London represented. Still, it’s real heart and soul, too. It plays into the strangeness of our city and our culture at large.
It also demonstrates how many endless stories there are for the brand to tap into, which dovetails neatly into the breadth of Burberry's product offerings woven into the social content. Reinforcing that the brand is for everyone. It’s luxury as what it was. Not simply the pursuit of the 1%, but an aspirational need state. That aspiration (as we know) has been forsaken through price hikes and siloing. The portraits campaign fully expresses the product pyramid without cannibalizing any equity—it grows it.
(Side note: The success of Burberry social content should be studied hard at Mulberry, where they’ll need to tread in similar spaces but bring their whimsy based on contradictions, rather than observations, to it, which will help differentiate the brand).
Not only are the structures repeatable and the approach clear, but they also leave space for experimentation and surprise. This latter part is one of the reasons LOEWE continues to work well. It is a creative-centric engine, and it’s never expected. The playbooks are, in fact, prisons.
I also have a personal appreciation of how hard this is to navigate internally. Before Esprit was arbitrarily Thanos’d by its owners, our social media was trending towards a similar approach. Ramping up creativity, cultural attunement, and the razor-sharp sense of the brand through diverse buying audiences will entertain and engage, elevate and shift the brand's perception, and (finally) adaptability to specific situations. So, to get this done so quickly, with so much clarity, isn’t simply a creative achievement but an operational one too. And should be celebrated as such.
Stone(d) Soul Picnic
I don’t need to tell you how Stone Island is cooking. The newest "Community as a Form of Research." campaign featuring Houston Rockets Jalen Green (wearing a sick jacket combo - birthday’s next month if anyone wants to pitch in…) demonstrates how flexible the idea remains, going mass with known faces and niche all within the same construct. We talk about how brilliant fashion campaigns transcend their seasonal context, and this is one of them.
But dig below the surface, and you'll see that the platform works just as well in editorial—a true throughline. The Stone Island VISLA Paper Issue reinforces this core point. The full magazine takeover saw creators and luminaries of South Korea’s cultural scene in Stoney, while the photographer Shimjae spent time in the Ravarino HQ.
While it’s not exactly the first time a brand has done an editorial like this, because there’s an organizing idea that connects brand, content, and editorial activity, it all feels cohesive and contextual to the audience. It might be a tactic, but it’s a tactic with a purpose.
How slop flows upstream
A pretty compelling argument from Idle Glaze. Worth a read.
Finally, musically, I went back into my LWSTD Archive for one of my favorite mixes of last year. Kick Out The (Extended) Jams. Inspired by reading the excellent Listening Sessions, wax lyrical on the impact of Issac Hayes ‘Hot Butter Soul’
I’ve always loved the long, drawn-out jam. The chance for the band and audience to thread together and go on a journey. As pretentious as it sounds, a superb extended jam does that. The line between noodling and revelation can be fine, whether Jazz, Blues, or just plain rock-based. But every one of these tunes has their distinct take on the idea. In weaving these seven songs together, I wanted to create a cohesive whole in my chosen flow. Mirroring how a great jam has form, structure, flow, and high-key emotion.
Linked the mix to the suitable batshit artwork below.
Final, evergreen note: If you want to work with or hire me. Get in touch with me here…
Hi James - thanks for referencing our article on Stone Island.
The grounding of the Burberry campaign in London is something we saw as a crucial difference between that and Stone Island's approach. One would assume it's a fundamental component of Burberry's strategy.
As you say, the brilliance of Stone Island's campaign is it is constructed in such a way as to transcend seasons, communities/niches, product types. It's brilliance is it's opportunity for flex. Will be interested in how Burberry invest in the continuation of their portraits story too as similarly, with the right editorial treatment it could be similarly evergreen.
Love the newsletter!
best, Tom