On Brand · Sameness
Burberry took its knight off, then brought it back
Luxury spent years sanding its logos down to plain type. The reversal says character is the asset.
By Shane Wilson · · 2 min read
In 2018 Burberry dropped its Equestrian Knight, the armored rider it had used for more than a century, and switched to a plain bold sans serif wordmark designed by Peter Saville. It wasn't alone. Around the same time a wave of fashion houses swapped their old lettering for clean capitals that looked a lot like each other. People started calling it blanding.
Five years later, in February 2023, Burberry's new creative chief Daniel Lee brought the knight back, along with a serif wordmark drawn from the brand's own archive. The emblem dates to a public design competition around 1901 and carries the Latin word Prorsum, meaning forwards.
Minimal isn't neutral
Stripping a logo down feels safe. It reads modern, it scales well, nobody objects. But when everyone strips down at once, the result is a row of brands you can't tell apart. The quirky details that got removed were often the only things doing the work of saying whose brand this was.
I see the small-brand version of this every week. A founder wants to look premium, so every rough edge gets cut until the brand looks like a template. Quiet luxury is not the same as nothing. The best quiet brands still have one strange, specific detail they refuse to give up.
What this means for your brand
- Keep one odd detail. A ligature, an illustration, an old story, a mark from your first version. Restraint everywhere else makes it louder.
- Look at your category, not just your logo. Line your brand up with ten competitors. If you swap the names and nothing changes, the brand isn't working yet.
- Mine your own history. First packaging, the founder's handwriting, the town you started in. Heritage doesn't need a hundred years. It needs to be true and yours.
