Burberry Sets Up Camp At Harrods

For Daniel Lee’s debut Burberry campaign – which boasted the likes of Liberty Ross, Vanessa Redgrave and Raheem Sterling photographed against a series of London landmarks (shout out to Kano atop an East Ham street sign!) – a street-smart fox is caught in the nighttime flash of Tyrone Lebon’s camera and two swans are seen emerging like avian aristos from the Thames.

“Burberry flies the flag for Britishness and for the UK and for culture,” Lee told Vogue Runway back in February 2023. The Bradford-born creative director’s vision of Blighty has meditated between the urban and the rural. The brand’s autumn/winter 2023 campaign was shot on the Isle of Skye in Scotland and Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, and it transformed London’s Bond Street tube last September into the knight-blue “Burberry Street”. The location of its spring/summer 2024 catwalk show? A vast show tent within the townhouse-circled greenery of Highbury Fields.

Those who also have a penchant for a pitching up a tent will be pleased to hear that for Burberry’s latest all-British celebration, the brand has set up camp at historic Knightsbridge department store Harrods, for a month-long store takeover that will encourage even the most outdoors-allergic city dwellers to dip their cashmere-socked toes into the great outdoors. Particularly when they’re trudging to a campsite toilet block carrying a Burberry branded hot water bottle.

“It all started with the archives,” says Lee. “Burberry has such a rich heritage with exploration and the outdoors, which felt really fitting with this collaboration with Harrods – another iconic British name that has been around since the mid-1800s.” The takeover kicks off Harrods’s 175th anniversary activations and – for the first time in its feted collaborative history (remember Dior’s gingerbread house facade in 2022 or its polka-dotted Yayoi Kusama and Louis Vuitton dreamscape in 2023?) – doormen will greet shoppers not in their signature bottle-green uniforms, but in knight-blue Burberry Check pieces.

Burberry’s Camping Corner at Harrods boasts a selection of trek-ready treats, including a limited-edition orienteering map of Knightsbridge, created in collaboration with Open City Charity.

While architecture geeks can ogle at Harrods’s reimagined awnings, crafted as peeled-back tent canopies also in Burberry Check, fans of the British brand’s previous pop-up at posh greasy spoon Norman’s Cafe can tuck into flapjacks and Chelsea Buns at a food truck pitched up at door five. “The tents are inspired by the ones created for adventurers in the early 20th century,” Lee explains. Inside? Burberry’s Camping Corner boasts a selection of classic British hiking accessories, from those aforementioned hot water bottles to bottle openers, plus piles of Duke of Edinburgh-ready Kendal Mint Cake. For those who really refuse to escape the city?

 A limited-edition orienteering map of Knightsbridge. At two new pop-up spaces, shoppers can also literally check out an exclusive 40-piece collection, which includes snuggly ponchos, Lee’s signature Chess and Rocking Horse bags, and that houndstooth check tracksuit sported by Barry Keoghan.

Burberry and Harrods will also plunge into the digital wilderness, where the takeover – with its food truck and camping corner – can be experienced through Roblox, where the Burberry Lola bag was “stocked” in 2022. Whether you’re compiling your IRL or URL camping checklist, Burberry’s outdoors essentials should be top of your knapsack.