THE BUSINESS OF AN ICON

Inside The Industry Series

How does a product become an icon, and how do you keep it relevant for the next generation?

There are thousands of fashion products launched every season. A handful become successful. Far fewer become recognisable. And only a very small number become icons. This week, TFTT went inside the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to explore one of the clearest examples: the Burberry trench.

The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon opened at the V&A on 21 September as part of Burberry’s 170th anniversary year. The free display traces the trench from its origins as practical outerwear and military attire to its place as a globally recognised fashion icon, bringing together material from the Burberry Archive and the V&A collection alongside contemporary interpretations.

But for TFTT, the interesting story isn't simply the exhibition. It is the question sitting behind it: how does a product become an icon? And perhaps even more importantly, how do you stop an icon becoming yesterday's story?

The first lesson from the trench is that icons rarely begin as icons. They begin by solving a problem. Thomas Burberry developed gabardine in 1879 as a weather-resistant fabric, and Burberry's history records the Tielocken coat, patented in 1912, as a forerunner to the trench. The trench subsequently emerged from the practical requirements of military service during the First World War.

That matters because the strongest products often have something at their core that is bigger than fashion: they do something. The trench protects against the elements. The Levi's 501 began as durable workwear. The Dr. Martens 1460 began as a practical boot. These products did not begin life because somebody decided they needed to become cultural symbols. They began with function.

Then culture starts doing something the original designer can never completely control. People wear products differently. They attach meaning to them. Different generations adopt them. Different subcultures reinterpret them. Designers change them. Consumers make them their own. That is when a product can move beyond its original purpose.

A brand can create a product. But people, culture and time help create an icon.

The Burberry trench is a powerful example because its recognisable identity has survived while its expression has changed. The V&A describes its journey from practical outerwear and military attire to a world-renowned fashion icon. Levi's 501 demonstrates a similar principle from a completely different category: Levi's describes the 501 as a cultural icon dating back to 1873, while continuing to introduce contemporary interpretations alongside its familiar design language. Dr. Martens offers another route. The 1460 began as an eight-eye boot in 1960, but its yellow stitching, grooved sole and distinctive construction became part of a design language that has remained recognisable across generations.

Different products. Different histories. Different consumers. But the underlying principle is remarkably similar: the product remains recognisable while the meaning around it evolves.

That brings us to one of the most important ingredients in creating an icon: distinctive codes. An iconic product does not necessarily need a huge logo. Sometimes the product itself becomes the brand language.

The Burberry trench's construction, silhouette, materials and functional details create a recognisable system. The V&A display brings together historic material with more contemporary interpretations, including dramatically different colours, materials and treatments. Yet the relationship between them remains visible.

That is an enormously valuable quality in fashion. Think about the Levi's 501, or the Dr. Martens 1460. Their individual design cues provide continuity while consumers continually reinterpret them through styling, culture and context. Distinctive codes create memory. And memory, over time, can become one of a brand's most valuable assets.

But creating an icon is only half the challenge.

How do you keep an icon relevant when fashion never stops changing?

Fashion changes. Consumers change. Culture changes. Technology changes. Distribution changes. New generations arrive without the same emotional relationship with a brand's history. The product therefore has to evolve, but without losing the DNA that made it distinctive.

This is where the Burberry trench becomes particularly instructive. The V&A does not present one definitive version of the trench and suggest that the story ends there. Instead, the exhibition demonstrates how the product has been repeatedly reinterpreted, bringing together historic material with recent Burberry designs and 19 runway looks from the past 25 years.

And that creates a fundamental tension: how much can you change before you change the thing people love?

Change too little and heritage can become static. Change too much and the product can lose the distinctiveness that made it powerful in the first place. The answer is not to choose between heritage and innovation. It is to understand the difference between the code and the expression.

The code is what makes the product recognisable. The expression is how you make it relevant now.

Protect the DNA. Reinvent the expression.

That is one of the most important lessons here for heritage fashion brands.

Because heritage is not the same as relevance.

The fashion industry often talks about heritage as though it is automatically valuable. It isn't. History alone does not create demand. A brand can have an extraordinary archive and still struggle to make consumers care about its products today.

The value of heritage comes from what it can create in the present: recognition, differentiation, credibility, emotional connection and desire. The archive tells us what a brand has been. The current product has to tell us why it still matters.

Barbour provides a useful parallel. Its Archive Re-Imagined work takes historic designs and reinterprets them for contemporary collections, including the Solway Waxed Jacket, first introduced in the 1950s. The significance is not simply that Barbour is bringing old products back. It is that the archive is being treated as a source of product ideas.

That distinction matters. The archive should be a source of ideas, not a place to hide.

And this is where an icon becomes a business asset.

An iconic product can give a brand something extremely difficult to manufacture from scratch: recognition built over time. But recognition is only the beginning. The product still needs to be desirable. It needs to be relevant to the consumer. It needs to work within the wider brand. And it needs to give people a reason to buy it now — not simply a reason to admire it.

Heritage therefore gives a brand a starting point. It does not give it the future.

There is an interesting paradox in what we are seeing at the V&A. Burberry's heritage is being celebrated inside one of the world's great museums at precisely the moment the brand continues to evolve as a contemporary fashion business. And that relationship goes further: the V&A and Burberry have announced a multi-year partnership under which the museum's Fashion Gallery will reopen as The Burberry Gallery in autumn 2028.

A museum exists to preserve. A fashion brand has to evolve. The challenge is making sure those two ideas do not become opposites.

Because the ultimate danger for a heritage product is not simply losing relevance.

It is becoming a museum piece while the brand is still trying to sell it.

The trench has avoided that fate because its story has continually moved between function, design, culture and creativity. And that is what makes the V&A exhibition more than a celebration of the past. It becomes a case study in how a fashion product can continue to earn relevance.

THE TFTT INSIDER VIEW

The fashion industry spends a huge amount of time talking about heritage. Perhaps we should be talking more about relevance.

Heritage is not valuable simply because it is old. It is valuable when the past gives a brand something distinctive that can be used to create the future.

The Burberry trench is a useful case study because its longevity has not come from remaining frozen in time. It has endured through a combination of function, recognisable design codes, craftsmanship, cultural meaning and continual reinterpretation.

Levi's 501 shows how a utilitarian product can become a global cultural symbol while retaining its core identity. Dr. Martens shows how a functional product can acquire entirely new cultural meanings without losing the design cues that make it unmistakably itself. Barbour demonstrates how an archive can actively feed contemporary product development.

And Burberry gives us the museum-scale version of the same question:

How do you take something that has already earned its place in history and make it matter now?

That is the real challenge.

The goal of a heritage brand should not be to protect its icons from change. It should be to understand what makes those icons matter, and then give each new generation a reason to care.

That moves heritage from being a story about the past to becoming a strategy for the future.

THE QUESTION FOR THE INDUSTRY

Every fashion brand wants to create the product that defines it. Very few will.

So perhaps the bigger question isn't “How do we create an iconic product?”

It is:

“What are we creating today that people will still care about tomorrow?”

Because the real measure of an icon isn't simply that it survived the past.

It is that it still has the power to shape what comes next.

Inside the Industry.
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