London pour Homme

In September 2006, Burberry added a masculine to the London line released a few months earlier for women. The house sells mostly clothing and entrusts its perfumes to Inter Parfums, but the launch received resources rare for the brand.

The masculine counterpart to a 2006 line

The bottle came in three sizes, sold at the time for seventy euros for one hundred milliliters, fifty-three for fifty, forty-four for thirty. The timing targeted the fall, the season when houses place their winter masculines.

Christopher Bailey led creative direction at Burberry at the time. Recruited in 2001 by Rose Marie Bravo, he had since been working to pull the tartan out of the rough patch into which street counterfeits had driven it.

The campaign and a first on television

Mario Testino photographed the two faces of the line, actress Rachel Weisz for the feminine and Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd for the masculine. The black and white images show the couple walking through London, smiling, dressed without affectation.

The rollout combined press and television, a medium Burberry had not previously used for a perfume. Single and double pages ran in magazines in September and October, plus a joint advertisement for both juices.

The promotional budget fell between fifteen and twenty million dollars according to industry estimates reported by the trade press. Bailey justified the choice of Gruffudd by a masculine presence that remains approachable.

Tartan stitched onto the glass

Fabian Baron signed the packaging design. The glass disappears beneath a piece of the famous check, stretched and stitched as on a garment, in browns markedly darker than those chosen for the women's version.

The box extends the idea with a trompe-l'oeil weave and a canvas label. A grooming line accompanies the fragrance: shaving spray, emulsion, body and hair gel, deodorant stick.

A house born of a waterproof fabric

Burberry was born in 1856 around an invention, gabardine, a tightly woven fabric that resists rain without stifling the wearer. The garments equipped field workers before dressing polar explorers.

The check became, around the turn of the 2000s, more of a liability than an asset, so commonplace had cheap copies made it. The London line responded to this discomfort by claiming the city and the wardrobe rather than the pattern.

Antoine Maisondieu's third Burberry

The perfumer had already signed Touch in 2000 and Brit pour Homme in 2004. London is his third masculine proposal for the house, and the only one where tobacco plays the lead role.

A reviewer reads this sequence as a rise in boldness: a violet slipped into Touch, a discreet rose in Brit, and for London the abandonment of dandy restraint in favor of a more earthbound virility.