When the fashion pendulum shifts away from the quiet and constrained, it really does swing. Clothes are louder — like Supreme’s logomania-revival jacket — and silhouettes are stranger. (See: the endless iteration on toe-shoes, split-toes, and sneaker-loafers.)

It tracks that fashion ads would follow suit, becoming more… well, more. 

Major brands are capping anniversaries with campaigns that pack in a veritable flood of models — both literal model-models, plus influencers, celebs, and the like — which then means a flood of fits, which then becomes yet another sensory overload. Call it a TikTok-ification or simply a “More is More” approach to hyping product, but this habit of throwing everything (and everyone) at the wall to see what sticks feels precarious. When it works, the worldbuilding feels genuinely cool. When it doesn’t, it feels like nothing more than product slop. 

Burberry became the latest brand to go big and bold this week: its 170th anniversary campaign features a logistically brain-busting selection of 170 models, photographed in London, New York, Seoul, and Shanghai. It’s a Burb-checked Where’s Waldo, populated with the requisite models, artists, and rappers, but also a dentist, herbal pharmacist, and data analyst, among many other normies. 

There’s something quaint about seeing New York Knicks legend OG Anunoby in the same ad as some London-based cybersecurity expert named Dev Dhanjal. This high and low — or maybe legend and layperson —  approach mostly works. But zoom out, and all these small rectangular shots blur into one mass, not unlike my own phone’s hopelessly chaotic camera roll. This is fine if the amalgamation of images actually looks unique, like Burberry’s, which captured each person outside in the world. 

But what if you just usher a conveyor belt of 160 people into five liminal photo studios? Same mix of celebrities and open-casted locals, just transplanted into a box? You get something like the sterile-by-comparison J.Crew ad, tied to its signature Barn Jacket’s 40th anniversary: 160 people in the fashion Backrooms, wearing this classic jacket but not really existing in a tangible time and space. 

Is it bad timing that these conceptually overlapping ads were released within a week of each other? Sure, but boy does it make for a strong visual contrast. Like last year’s 50-model 50th anniversary campaign at Zara — a who’s who of famous “icons,” shot in stark black-and-white against a white backdrop — there’s a flatness to the overload. 

If a major fashion brand is going to go out of its way to gather a village’s worth of people together for an ad, the least it can do is make the resulting campaign feel lived in. 

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